Minimum Description Length of a Spectrum Variational Autoencoder: A Theory

Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained through end-to-end learning have achieved remarkable success across diverse machine learning tasks, yet they are not explicitly designed to adhere to the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, which posits that the best model provides the shortest description of the data. In this paper, we argue that MDL is essential to deep learning and propose a further generalized principle: Understanding is the use of a small amount of information to represent a large amount of information. To this end, we introduce a novel theoretical framework for designing and evaluating deep Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) based on MDL. In our theory, we designed the Spectrum VAE, a specific VAE architecture whose MDL can be rigorously evaluated under given conditions. Additionally, we introduce the concept of latent dimension combination, or pattern of spectrum, and provide the first theoretical analysis of their role in achieving MDL. We claim that a Spectrum VAE understands the data distribution in the most appropriate way when the MDL is achieved. This work is entirely theoretical and lays the foundation for future research on designing deep learning systems that explicitly adhere to information-theoretic principles.

@article{zhang2025_2504.00395,
  title={ Minimum Description Length of a Spectrum Variational Autoencoder: A Theory },
  author={ Canlin Zhang and Xiuwen Liu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.00395},
  year={ 2025 }
}