Tutorial on Variational Autoencoders
This is an incremental tutorial aimed at researchers and practitioners in machine learning seeking to understand and apply VAEs.
The tutorial tackles the need for accessible education on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), a popular method for unsupervised learning of complex distributions, by providing an intuitive and mathematical explanation without requiring prior knowledge of variational Bayesian methods.
In just three years, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have emerged as one of the most popular approaches to unsupervised learning of complicated distributions. VAEs are appealing because they are built on top of standard function approximators (neural networks), and can be trained with stochastic gradient descent. VAEs have already shown promise in generating many kinds of complicated data, including handwritten digits, faces, house numbers, CIFAR images, physical models of scenes, segmentation, and predicting the future from static images. This tutorial introduces the intuitions behind VAEs, explains the mathematics behind them, and describes some empirical behavior. No prior knowledge of variational Bayesian methods is assumed.