arXiv:2604.06796v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Variational autoencoders (VAEs) rely on amortized variational inference to enable efficient posterior approximation, but this efficiency comes at the cost of a shared parametrization, giving rise to the amortization gap. We propose the instance-adaptive variational autoencoder (IA-VAE), an amortized inference framework in which a hypernetwork generates input-dependent modulations of a shared encoder. This enables input-specific adaptation of the inference model while preserving the efficiency of a single forward pass. From a theoretical perspective, we show that the variational family induced by IA-VAE contains that of standard amortized inference, implying that IA-VAE cannot yield a worse optimal ELBO. By leveraging instance-specific parameter modulations, the proposed approach can achieve performance comparable to standard encoders with substantially fewer parameters, indicating a more efficient use of model capacity. Experiments on synthetic data, where the true posterior is known, show that IA-VAE yields more accurate posterior approximations and reduces the amortization gap. Similarly, on standard image benchmarks, IA-VAE consistently improves held-out ELBO over baseline VAEs, with statistically significant gains across multiple runs. These results suggest that increasing the flexibility of the inference parametrization through instance-adaptive modulation is an effective strategy for mitigating amortization-induced suboptimality in deep generative models.