Variational Autoencoders
Variational Autoencoders (VAE) are a more recent take on the autoencoding problem. Unlike autoencoders, which learn a compressed representation of the data, Variational Autoencoders learn the random process that generates such data, instead of learning an essentially arbitrary function as we previously did with our neural networks.
VAEs have also an encoder and decoder part. The encoder learns the mean and standard deviation of a normal distribution that is assumed to have generated the data. The mean and standard deviation are called latent variables because they are not observed explicitly, rather inferred from the data.
The decoder part of VAEs maps back these latent space points into the data. As before, we need ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access