Estimating the rate-distortion function of real-world data, part 2
Your (beta-)VAE might be secretly estimating the rate-distortion function of your data.

Estimating the rate-distortion function of real-world data, part 1
What is the rate-distortion function, and why we may care about it.

All the Ways to Carve Up the ELBO
My list of fancy decompositions of the aggregate ELBO, focusing on the role of the aggregate KL regularizer, its relation to the aggregate posterior, and the mutual information between the data and the latent variable.