Loss function of VAE

[blastlove]

Hi, thanks for your developing this useful tool! I noticed that you used binary cross entropy rather than mean square error as the reconstruction loss term.

I learned VAE from the textbook, and the derivation of reconstruction term is as below.

The above formula shows that the reconstruction term is the mean square error between x and recon_x. So I'm curious why you chose to use binary cross entropy.

Thanks a lot if you can reply to this question.

[jsxlei]

Hi thanks for your interests. Since we min max the values range from 0 to 1, it will be a liitle better to use binary cross entropy here to optimize the model. Mean square error also works.