Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes, Diederik P Kingma, Max Welling, 2013International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1312.6114 - This foundational paper introduces the Variational Autoencoder, derives the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), and details the probabilistic basis of the reconstruction term for both binary and continuous data.
Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - Chapter 20 offers a comprehensive theoretical treatment of deep generative models, including VAEs, their objective function (ELBO), and its constituent components like the reconstruction loss.
CS236: Deep Generative Models (Course Materials), Stefano Ermon and Aditya Grover, 2023 (Stanford University) - Stanford University's course materials provide structured educational content on deep generative models, including clear explanations of VAEs, the ELBO decomposition, and the interpretation of the reconstruction loss.