Please read Section 19.2 of the Bishop Book.
More background on the Evidence Lower Bound can be found in sections 16.3 and 15.4.
If you also want to refresh your knowledge on basic autoencoders, you can additionally read Section 19.1 of the Bishop Book.
In earlier iterations of this course, we relied on specific sections of the Deep Learning Book that also cover these topics. If you are interested, please refer to the reading assignment from the 2024 class.