# Variational auto-encoders with Student's t-prior

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.02581 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02581/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [t3-Variational Autoencoder: Learning Heavy-tailed Data with Student's t and Power Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01133/) (2023)
- [Flexible Tails for Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16971/) (2024)
- [Fat-Tailed Variational Inference with Anisotropic Tail Adaptive Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07918/) (2022)
- [Improving Variational Autoencoder based Out-of-Distribution Detection for Embedded Real-time Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11750/) (2021)
- [ProSAM: Enhancing the Robustness of SAM-based Visual Reference Segmentation with Probabilistic Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21835/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Deep Generative Model for Semi-Supervised Learning under Class Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06289/) (2026)
- [ELVAE: Evidential Learning-Based Variational Autoencoder for Uncertainty-Aware Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10398/) (2026)
- [Correcting Noisy Multilabel Predictions: Modeling Label Noise through Latent Space Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14281/) (2025)
- [Heavy-Tailed Class-Conditional Priors for Long-Tailed Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02154/) (2025)
- [Pro-t-VAE: Closed-Form Student's t Mixtures for Robust Prototype Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14894/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a new structure for the variational auto-encoders (VAEs) prior, with the weakly informative multivariate Student's t-distribution. In the proposed model all distribution parameters are trained, thereby allowing for a more robust approximation of the underlying data distribution. We used Fashion-MNIST data in two experiments to compare the proposed VAEs with the standard Gaussian priors. Both experiments showed a better reconstruction of the images with VAEs using Student's t-prior distribution.