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Simon Damm

3 accepted papers

2025

ELBO, regularized maximum likelihood, and their common one-sample approximation for training stochastic neural networks

UAI 2025

Monte Carlo approximations are central to the training of stochastic neural networks in general, and Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) in particular. We observe that the common one-sample approximation of the standard training objective can be viewed both as maximizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO)

2023

The ELBO of Variational Autoencoders Converges to a Sum of Entropies

AISTATS 2023poster

The central objective function of a variational autoencoder (VAE) is its variational lower bound (the ELBO). Here we show that for standard (i.e., Gaussian) VAEs the ELBO converges to a value given by the sum of three entropies: the (negative) entropy of the prior distribution, the expected (negativ…