arXiv:2606.00635v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern VAEs are rarely trained with the pointwise likelihood implied by the standard $\beta$-VAE objective. In practice, pointwise reconstruction is often combined with perceptual and adversarial losses, despite a lack of understanding of how this changes the latent dynamics of the model. We show that the choice of reconstruction loss reshapes the rate-distortion problem itself, altering both the information content and the geometry of the learned latent space in ways that may be invisible from reconstructions alone. First, we prove and verify em
Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.