I'm reading this paper on latent representations with the information bottleneck https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06216.pdf and in section three, the authors write that the parametric formulation of the information bottleneck is
$\max\limits_{\phi,\theta} - I_\phi(t;x) + \lambda I_{\phi,\theta}(t;y).$
My question is not about the information bottleneck entirely, but how to understand the first term $\max\limits_{\phi,\theta}$ where $\phi$ and $\theta$ are parameters of a model. This notation doesn't make sense to me as I usually expect something to follow the $\max$. Does it just mean the largest value over all the parameters in the model?