ELBO Failure Dynamics

Current Conference-Paper State

Source: path:paper/conference-paper/figures/wrap-elbo-fails.tex, input from path:paper/conference-paper/sections/03-methodology.tex.

Label: fig:elbo-fails.

Asset: path:paper/figure-production/elbo_failure_dynamics/output/normalized_overlay/elbo_failure_dynamics.pdf.

Caption headline: Standard ELBO preserves sampled behavior while collapsing the strategy variable.

The current wrapfigure shows Distributional Fidelity rising while posterior-router KL collapses and Strategy Alignment remains low. It supports the methodology argument that matching the marginal response distribution does not identify a strategy-aligned router-generator factorization.

Writing Role

This figure motivates the base-directed reconstruction objective by showing the failure mode of the standard conditional ELBO in this problem setting.

Stale Or Open Items

The caption uses the current compact metric label Strategy Alignment. If the nearby text defines Strategy Alignment as cross-input latent strategy alignment, this figure is consistent with the metric naming decisions in Metrics and frontier language.