MML-16-11: Variational Inference & VAEs: Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) & The Reparameterization Trick – Practice Quiz

Master the mathematical theory of Variational Inference (VI) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs): intractable marginal likelihoods, reverse KL minimization, exact decomposition and Jensen derivation of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), closed-form Gaussian KL divergence and gradients, score-function (REINFORCE) vs. pathwise Reparameterization Trick gradients, amortized inference, posterior collapse, beta-VAEs, and Importance Weighted Autoencoders (IWAE).