J. Hirn

$\beta$-VAEs as Effective Theories: Tolerance-Dependent Dimension

In a $\beta$-VAE, increasing the regularization strength acts as a spectral cutoff by collapsing low-utility latent coordinates. In the linear Gaussian VAE, the collapse order matches the ranking of reconstruction utilities exactly, because both are set by the PCA spectrum. We ask which parts of this picture survive in...