This paper introduces a new member of the family of Variational Autoencoders (VAE) that constrains the rate of information transferred by the latent layer. The latent layer is interpreted as a communication channel, the information rate of which is bound by imposing a pre-set signal-to-noise ratio. The new constraint subsumes the mutual information between the input and latent variables, combining naturally with the likelihood objective of the observed data as used in a conventional VAE. The resulting Bounded-Information-Rate Variational Autoencoder (BIR-VAE) provides a meaningful latent representation with an information resolution that can be specified directly in bits by the system designer. The rate constraint can be used to prevent overtraining, and the method naturally facilitates quantisation of the latent variables at the set rate. Our experiments confirm that the BIR-VAE has a meaningful latent representation and that its performance is at least as good as state-of-the-art competing algorithms, but with lower computational complexity.

该论文介绍了一种新型的变分自编码器（VAEs）——Bounded-Information-Rate Variational Autoencoder（BIR-VAE），通过限制潜层传输的信息速率，将互信息和似然概率结合，提供了一种可以被系统设计者直接指定为比特的信息分辨率，提高了潜在信息的意义，同时有助于避免过拟合，并以较低的计算复杂度达到了至少与同类算法相同的性能。

有界信息速率变分自编码器