{
  "id": 4857,
  "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05813v1",
  "title": "A Testable Certificate for Constant Collapse in Teacher-Guided VAEs",
  "summary": "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",
  "authors": "Zegu Zhang, Jianhua Peng, Jian Zhang",
  "category": "research",
  "topics": "safety-alignment,healthcare,children-education",
  "orgs": null,
  "regions": null,
  "published_at": "2026-05-07T07:48:41.000Z",
  "fetched_at": "2026-07-14T16:31:17.584Z",
  "source_slug": "arxiv-ethics",
  "source_name": "arXiv",
  "source_homepage": "https://arxiv.org",
  "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/4857",
  "original_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05813v1",
  "evidence_status": "source-only",
  "attribution": "via ethics.ai"
}