This document discusses variational inference with Rényi divergence. It summarizes variational autoencoders (VAEs), which are deep generative models that parametrize a variational approximation with a recognition network. VAEs define a generative model as a hierarchical latent variable model and approximate the intractable true posterior using variational inference. The document explores using Rényi divergence as an alternative to the evidence lower bound objective of VAEs, as it may provide tighter variational bounds.