They do! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18777 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18777 But that doesn't mean a frequentist views a VAE as a generative model! Putting it

They do! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18777 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18777 But that doesn't mean a frequentist views a VAE as a generative model! Putting it another way, Gaussian processes originated as a frequentist technique! But to a frequentist they are not generative.