Yeah, I guess I was thinking of VQVAE as a state-of-the-art example, but it was indeed 2017. Time flies! It's still pretty influential on newer systems though,

Yeah, I guess I was thinking of VQVAE as a state-of-the-art example, but it was indeed 2017. Time flies! It's still pretty influential on newer systems though, e.g. OpenAI's DALL-E that made waves earlier this year has a VAE component (in addition to a Transformer component).