Deep latent-variable models learn representations of high-dimensional data in an unsupervised manner. A number of recent efforts have focused on learning representations that disentangle statistically independent axes of variation, often by introducing suitable modifications of the objective function. We synthesize this growing body of literature by formulating a generalization of the evidence lower bound that explicitly represents the trade-offs between sparsity of the latent code, bijectivity of representations, and coverage of the support of the empirical data distribution. Our objective is also suitable to learning hierarchical representations that disentangle blocks of variables whilst allowing for some degree of correlations within blocks. Experiments on a range of datasets demonstrate that learned representations contain interpretable features, are able to learn discrete attributes, and generalize to unseen combinations of factors.

本研究提出了一种两级分层目标函数来控制变量块和块内个体变量之间的相对统计独立程度，以通过非监督学习从高维数据中学习无监督表示，实验结果显示该目标函数可以解开离散变量，并提高其他变量的解开程度和泛化能力。

结构化解耦表征