# Meta-Amortized Variational Inference and Learning Source: [Meta-Amortized Variational Inference and Learning]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:56:40.334Z Authors: Mike Wu, Kristy Choi, Noah Goodman, Stefano Ermon Published: 2019-02-05T22:06:25.000Z ## Abstract Despite the recent success in probabilistic modeling and their applications, generative models trained using traditional inference techniques struggle to adapt to new distributions, even when the target distribution may be closely related to the ones seen during training. In this work, we present a doubly-amortized variational inference procedure as a way to address this challenge. By sharing computation across not only a set of query inputs, but also a set of different, related probabilistic models, we learn transferable latent representations that generalize across several related distributions. In particular, given a set of distributions over images, we find the learned representations to transfer to different data transformations. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by introducing the MetaVAE, and show that it significantly outperforms baselines on downstream image classification tasks on MNIST (10-50%) and NORB (10-35%). ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()