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In this paper, we investigate influence functions [Koh and Liang, 2017], a popular instance-based interpretation method, for a class of deep generative models called variational auto-encoders (VAE). We formally frame the counter-factual question answered by influence functions in this setting, and through theoretical analysis, examine what they reveal about the impact of training samples on classical unsupervised learning methods. We then introduce VAE- TracIn, a computationally efficient and theoretically sound solution based on Pruthi et al. [2020], for VAEs. 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