Learning Hierarchical Priors in VAEs

We propose to learn a hierarchical prior in the context of variational autoencoders to avoid the over-regularisation resulting from a standard normal prior distribution. To incentivise an informative latent representation of the data, we formulate the learning problem as a constrained optimisation problem by extending the Taming VAEs framework to two-level hierarchical models. We introduce a graph-based interpolation method, which shows that the topology of the learned latent representation corresponds to the topology of the data manifold---and present several examples, where desired properties of latent representation such as smoothness and simple explanatory factors are learned by the prior.

PDF Abstract NeurIPS 2019 PDF NeurIPS 2019 Abstract
No code implementations yet. Submit your code now

Tasks


Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods


No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here