High-Dimensional Latents Should Be Diagnosed Through Phase Structure
We study autoencoder and variational-autoencoder latent spaces through the lens of spin-glass theory. The paper has two components. First, we formalize a latent-space spin-glass dictionary: for a fixed decoder, the reconstruction term together with a hyperspherical coordinates prior induces a Hamiltonian on the latent sphere, where latent coordinates play the role of continuous spins and the prior acts as an external magnetic field. This allows us to import operational spin-glass diagnostics -- overlap distributions, susceptibility, and block-spin coarse-graining -- to detect ordered, disordered, and edge-of-stability phases in trained latent representations. Second, we show that delibera...
| Authors | Alejandro Ascarate, Leo Lebrat, Rodrigo Santa Cruz et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cond-mat.dis-nn |
| Published | 23 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 May 2026 |
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