Lost and Found in Translation: Variational Diagnostics for Neural Codebook Channels

ArXi:2605.18846v1 Announce Type: cross Classical communication systems fail not only through random noise but also when transmitter and receiver use incompatible operational codebooks. Variational autoencoders (VAEs) train an encoder $q_\phi$ and decoder $p_\theta$ jointly, and practitioners treat the resulting latent space as a discrete code -- for clustering, conditional generation, and mechanistic interpretability.