In this short post, we will take a look at variational lower bound, also referred to as the evidence lower bound or ELBO for short. While I have referenced ELBO in a previous blog post on VAEs, the proofs and formulations presented in the post seems somewhat overly convoluted in retrospect. One might consider this a gentler, more refined recap on the topic. For the remainder of this post, I will use the terms “variational lower bound” and “ELBO” interchangeably to refer to the same co...
