Variational Auto-Encoder

VAE

Regular encoder

The true data(image) distribution. Intractable because of the final term.

variational lower bound (ELBo): the term that VAE tries to maximize.

Also known as the reconstruction loss. Basically, it means that "input data" should be likely under the final distribution output from the model

Encoder output (approximate posterior) should match approximate a Gaussian distribution (prior) that we defined.