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Beauty is in the ELBO of the Beholder: A Variational Account of Processing Fluency in Face Perception

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 25, 2026 · UTC

Facial attractiveness has been linked to statistical regularities such as symmetry and averageness, suggesting that beauty may depend on the ease with which a face is perceived. We empirically test this hypothesis by training variational autoencoders on four face datasets without attractiveness supervision and evaluating their representations on the 597 faces from the Chicago Face Database. Across models, human attractiveness ratings closely aligns with the direction defined by the VAE evidence lower bound (ELBO) in rate-distortion space. Independently learned latent spaces contain an attracti

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