Contrastive Deterministic Autoencoders For Language Modeling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular family of generative models with wide applicability. Training VAEs, especially for text, often runs into the issue of posterior collapse, resulting in loss of representation quality. Deterministic autoencoders avoid this issue, and have been explored particularly well for images. It is however unclear how to best modify a deterministic model designed for images into a successful one for text. We show that with suitable adaptations, we can significantly improve on batch-normed VAEs (BN-VAEs), a strong benchmark for language modeling with VAEs, by replacing them with analogous deterministic models. We employ techniques from contrastive learning to control the entropy of the aggregate posterior of these models to make it Gaussian. The resulting models skip reparametrization steps in VAE modeling and avoid posterior collapse, while outperforming a broad range of VAE models on text generation and downstream tasks from representations. These improvements are shown to be consistent across both LSTM and Transformer-based VAE architectures. Appropriate comparisons to BERT/GPT-2 based results are also included. We also qualitatively examine the latent space through interpolation to supplement the quantitative aspects of the model.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".