Beauty is in the ELBO of the Beholder: A Variational Account of Processing Fluency in Face Perception
The study tested if human attractiveness aligns with variational autoencoder (VAE) evidence lower bound (ELBO) in rate-distortion space, proposing a variational interpretation of processing fluency. Findings show attractiveness correlates with ELBO metrics like low distortion and low rate, suggesting beauty stems from how easily a face can be encoded and represented by the model.