[D] The variational autoencoder is now 10 years old

And I feel old lol.

In all seriousness though, it's seemed to have stood the test of time as a practical choice for deep generative modelling. In contrast, GAN research seemed to have become stagnant, and flows, energy-based models and diffusion/score-based models are being incorporated into the VAE to enable a more expressive prior. I definitely believe that VAEs will remain useful for a long time to come.

Just a thought.

autoencoder become contrast diffusion energy gan generative machinelearning modelling practical research test vae