3 papers
cs.LG2026
A Simplex Witness Certificate and Escape Force for Constant Collapse in Variational Autoencoders
Zegu Zhang, Jian Zhang
We study exact constant collapse in variational autoencoders: the deterministic encoder mean becomes independent of the input. The prior remains the standard Gaussian. Before VAE t…
cs.LG2026
Spherical VAE with Cluster-Aware Feasible Regions: Guaranteed Prevention of Posterior Collapse
Zegu Zhang, Jian Zhang
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) frequently suffer from posterior collapse, where the latent variables become uninformative as the approximate posterior degenerates to the prior. Wh…
cs.LG2026
A Testable Certificate for Constant Collapse in Teacher-Guided VAEs
Zegu Zhang, Jianhua Peng, Jian Zhang
Posterior collapse in variational autoencoders is often diagnosed by its symptoms: a small KL term, a strong decoder, or weak use of the latent code. These signals are useful, but…