Why does my variational autoencoder only produce positive values?
I copied this example to build a variational autoencoder (VAE). The example uses images, but I use it for a signal that contains negative values. After training, the autoencoder only reconstructs the positive part of the signal, it does not produce negative values. Can anyone spot where the problem is or explain why this is the case?

If you used the exact code as the one shown in the example you put the link in, then at the end of the decoder you have x = torch.sigmoid(self.decConv2(x)) which take the real number line and outputs numbers between [0, 1]. This is why the network is unable to output negative numbers.
If you want to change the model to output negative numbers as well, remove the sigmoid function.
This means of course that you also have to change the loss function with which you train your model since the BCE loss is only good for outputs in the range of [0, 1].
As a recommendation I would suggest anyone to use the BCE with logits loss and avoid using the sigmoid in the decoder since this method incorporates the sigmoid and the BCE loss in a more numerically stable manner.
