  On dedicated analog hardware, equilibrium propagation is an energy-efficient
alternative to backpropagation. In spite of its theoretical guarantees, its
application in the AI domain remains limited to the discriminative setting.
Meanwhile, despite its high computational demands, generative AI is on the
rise. In this paper, we demonstrate the application of Equilibrium Propagation
in training a variational autoencoder (VAE) for generative modeling. Leveraging
the symmetric nature of Hopfield networks, we propose using a single model to
serve as both the encoder and decoder which could effectively halve the
required chip size for VAE implementations, paving the way for more efficient
analog hardware configurations.
