On Disentanglement and Mutual Information in Semi-Supervised Variational Auto-Encoders

摘要

In the context of variational auto-encoders, learning disentangled latent variable representations remains a challenging problem. In this abstract, we consider the semi-supervised setting, in which the factors of variation are labelled for a small fraction of our samples. We examine how the quality of learned representations is affected by the dimension of the unsupervised component of the latent space. We also consider a variational lower bound for the mutual information between the data and the semi-supervised component of the latent space, and analyze its role in the context of disentangled representation learning.