Autoencoders and Generative Models

2 min

Objective: distinguish reconstruction, probabilistic generation and families of models.

Autoencoder

An encoder turns x into a latent representation z; a decoder reconstructs . The network minimizes a reconstruction loss. If it has too much capacity without constraint, it may learn a plain identity and produce a useless representation.

text
x → encoder → z → decoder → x̂

Uses: compression, denoising, pretraining, anomaly detection. A large reconstruction error is only a good anomaly score if the protocol confirms it.

VAE

The Variational Autoencoder learns a latent distribution and optimizes reconstruction plus KL regularization. Samples can be drawn in the latent space and then decoded. The trade-off between fidelity and latent structure is central.

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