A Testable Certificate for Constant Collapse in Teacher-Guided VAEs

Abstract

Posterior collapse in variational autoencoders is often diagnosed by its symptoms: a small KL term, a strong decoder, or weak use of the latent code. These signals are useful, but they do not define a collapse boundary. We study a concrete failure mode, input-independent constant collapse, and show that this case admits an exact threshold. For any fixed nonconstant teacher distribution \(T(\cdot\mid x)\), the best constant student is the dataset-average teacher distribution, and its alignment cost is the teacher mutual information \(I_T(X;T)\). Therefore, if a strictly latent-only raw witness achieves alignment loss below this value, with a safety margin, the witness cannot be constant in the input. This identity turns a qualitative failure mode into a measurable one. In CIFAR-100 experiments with per-seed teacher search, full training stays on the certified side of the boundary, removing alignment drives the raw witness into the constant-student regime, and restarting from a collapsed checkpoint with alignment enabled restores the certificate. Tiny-ImageNet-200 fixed-target runs show the same prevention--collapse--rescue pattern across three independently searched teachers. Standard VAE-style baselines, including methods that preserve reconstruction quality or post-hoc predictability, remain negative under the raw certificate. The guarantee is intentionally narrow: it certifies that the matched nonconstant teacher-relative variation passes through the latent pathway, rather than claiming that all forms of posterior collapse have been ruled out.