L4 Latent Variable Models and Variational AutoEncoders -- CS294-158 SP24 Deep Unsupervised Learning

Instructors: Pieter Abbeel, Kevin Frans, Philipp Wu, Wilson Yan
Lecture Slides: docs.google.com/presentation/...
Course Website: sites.google.com/view/berkele...

[@kamilkisielewicz2910]

Great lecture, was nice to have the derivation of the objective spelled out in such an intuitive way

[@KostyaKanishev]

To the question 21:05 The estimate is unbiased - it is correctly stated that it is asymptotically exact - but it has high variance. The variational inference approach gives another tradeoff: lower the variance at the cost of the bias introduced by restricting the family of the proposal latent densities q(z).

[@sahhaf1234]

@40:13 yes, but how to backpropagate through such a thing? That's not clear at all..
It is all the more difficult to understand because the neural nets hide within pdf's...