We present a novel extension of the traditional neural network approach to classification tasks, referred to as variational classification (VC). By incorporating latent variable modeling, akin to the relationship between variational autoencoders and traditional autoencoders, we derive a training objective based on the evidence lower bound (ELBO), optimized using an adversarial approach. Our VC model allows for more flexibility in design choices, in particular class-conditional latent priors, in place of the implicit assumptions made in off-the-shelf softmax classifiers. Empirical evaluation on image and text classification datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in terms of maintaining prediction accuracy while improving other desirable properties such as calibration and adversarial robustness, even when applied to out-of-domain data.

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