How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
A Gaussian model with a positive inference gap and a collapsed latent
Example
Assume AC and use Lebesgue measure for the latent densities. In the first model, a scalar latent variable has prior , and conditional on the observation is with IID . At the observed value , the evidence is finite and positive and the posterior is . Restrict the encoder family to for and choose . This encoder is admissible and its reverse-KL gap, with , is , so its ELBO is exactly below the log evidence.
In a second model, let and use the standard normal density for , independent of . For every observation , the evidence is and the posterior equals the prior. Choose the constant encoder for every . Its reverse-KL gap is zero and its ELBO equals the log evidence on every fibre. Thus for all , a posterior-collapse configuration in which the decoder ignores the latent variable; this is one model configuration, not a claim that VAE training always collapses.
Example references
The VAE densities, posterior and ELBO conventions.
The evidence–ELBO–reverse-KL identity under AC.
The exact Normal-Normal posterior and positive evidence.
The directional reverse-KL convention.
Johnson, Ott, and Dogucu, Bayes Rules!, Chapter 5.
Kingma and Welling, Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes, arXiv v1.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: AC; the two stated latent-variable models and observations; the restricted encoder family in the first model; and the definitions of evidence, posterior, admissibility and ELBO.
The Axiom of Choice: every family of nonempty sets has a choice function; AC is used by the Gaussian density suppliers and the library KL branch.
Variational autoencoder model, encoder, and ELBO: for positive finite evidence, ; an encoder is admissible when it is a probability density supported where is positive with the stated absolute log-integrability; its ELBO is the integral of under .
Known-variance Normal-Normal conjugate update: with prior , positive known variance , and IID observations from , the evidence is finite and positive and the posterior has variance and mean equal to that variance times .
Standard normal and normal laws and A positive-variance normal law has its location-scale density: is a probability law with density , and for , has density .
Location-scale normal laws have their stated mean and variance: a variable with law has mean and finite variance .
Kullback–Leibler divergence: for probability measures with densities and relative to one reference measure and , the reverse divergence is .
The VAE evidence equals the ELBO plus reverse KL: for each admissible fixed observation under AC, log evidence equals ELBO plus the library reverse-KL divergence.
Verification
Given: The hypotheses in the Example and Facts & Assumptions.
In the first model set , , , , and . By [F2], the posterior variance is and its mean is ; the evidence is finite and positive.
The chosen lies in the family because , while the posterior mean is outside that interval. Both Gaussian densities are strictly positive, so is supported where the posterior is positive. Their logarithms are quadratic and has finite second moment by [F4], so the absolute log-integrability required in [F1] holds. Using the common-variance density formula [F3], Taking -expectations and using [F4] gives by the directional convention [F5].
Applying [F6] to the first model, the log-evidence minus ELBO is exactly this reverse-KL value , which is strictly positive.
In the second model, write and let be the prior density. For every , [F3] gives and , so has evidence and posterior . The constant encoder has full support and finite second moment by [F4]; its log density and are integrable under by [F1]. Thus its reverse-KL is zero and [F6] gives ELBO equal to log evidence on every fibre. The decoder density is independent of , so for all , which is posterior collapse.
Depends on
- Variational autoencoder model, encoder, and ELBO
- The VAE evidence equals the ELBO plus reverse KL
- The Axiom of Choice
- Kullback–Leibler divergence
- Known-variance Normal-Normal conjugate update
- Standard normal and normal laws
- A positive-variance normal law has its location-scale density
- Location-scale normal laws have their stated mean and variance
Used by
Nothing in the library uses this result yet.
Dependency tree · two levels
66 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- Alicia A. Johnson, Miles Q. Ott, and Mine Dogucu, Bayes Rules!, Chapter 5 (standard reference, not scraped)
- Diederik P. Kingma and Max Welling, Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes, arXiv:1312.6114v1 (standard reference, not scraped)
- Junxian He, Daniel Spokoyny, Graham Neubig, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Lagging Inference Networks and Posterior Collapse in Variational Autoencoders (standard reference, not scraped)