Evidence record 4857 · automatically gathered

A Testable Certificate for Constant Collapse in Teacher-Guided VAEs

Posterior collapse in variational autoencoders is often diagnosed by its symptoms: a small KL term, a strong decoder, or weak use of the latent code. These signals are useful, but they do not define a collapse boundary. We study a concrete failure mode, input-independent constant collapse, and show that this case admits an exact threshold. For any fixed nonconstant teacher distribution \(T(\cdot\mid x)\), the best constant student is the dataset-average teacher distribution, and its alignment co

Record details

Published: 7 May 2026
Source: arXiv
Category: Research
Topics: Safety & alignment · Healthcare · Children & education
Retrieved: 14 July 2026

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ethics.ai (7 May 2026), “A Testable Certificate for Constant Collapse in Teacher-Guided VAEs,” evidence record 4857, https://ethics.ai/record/4857 (originally published by arXiv).

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