{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/improving-variational-auto-encoders-using-1","title":"Improving Variational Auto-Encoders using Householder Flow","arxiv_id":"1611.09630","date":"2016-11-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jakub M. Tomczak","Max Welling"],"abstract":"Variational auto-encoders (VAE) are scalable and powerful generative models.\nHowever, the choice of the variational posterior determines tractability and\nflexibility of the VAE. Commonly, latent variables are modeled using the normal\ndistribution with a diagonal covariance matrix. This results in computational\nefficiency but typically it is not flexible enough to match the true posterior\ndistribution. One fashion of enriching the variational posterior distribution\nis application of normalizing flows, i.e., a series of invertible\ntransformations to latent variables with a simple posterior. In this paper, we\nfollow this line of thinking and propose a volume-preserving flow that uses a\nseries of Householder transformations. We show empirically on MNIST dataset and\nhistopathology data that the proposed flow allows to obtain more flexible\nvariational posterior and competitive results comparing to other normalizing\nflows.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1611.09630v4","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.09630v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"improving-variational-auto-encoders-using-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/jmtomczak/vae_householder_flow","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"improving-variational-auto-encoders-using-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/jmtomczak/vae_vpflows","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"computational-efficiency","task_name":"Computational Efficiency"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1611.09630","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1611.09630"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/jmtomczak/vae_vpflows","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/jmtomczak/vae_householder_flow","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"listed":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"2cdb596685b388d0","entry":"arch2str","repo":"jmtomczak/vae_householder_flow","repo_kind":"listed","path":"utils/commons.py","file_url":"https://github.com/jmtomczak/vae_householder_flow/blob/HEAD/utils/commons.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"2cdb596685b388d0"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}