We propose a novel VAE-based deep auto-encoder model that can learn disentangled latent representations in a fully unsupervised manner, endowed with the ability to identify all meaningful sources of variation and their cardinality. Our model, dubbed Relevance-Factor-VAE, leverages the total correlation (TC) in the latent space to achieve the disentanglement goal, but also addresses the key issue of existing approaches which cannot distinguish between meaningful and nuisance factors of latent variation, often the source of considerable degradation in disentanglement performance. We tackle this issue by introducing the so-called relevance indicator variables that can be automatically learned from data, together with the VAE parameters. Our model effectively focuses the TC loss onto the relevant factors only by tolerating large prior KL divergences, a desideratum justified by our semi-parametric theoretical analysis. Using a suite of disentanglement metrics, including a newly proposed one, as well as qualitative evidence, we demonstrate that our model outperforms existing methods across several challenging benchmark datasets.

我们提出了一种新颖的基于VAE的深度自编码器模型，可以完全无监督地学习分解的潜在表征，具有识别所有有意义的变异源及其基数的能力，该模型通过引入所谓的关联指标变量并联合VAE参数进行自动学习，有效地将总相关损失集中到相关因素上，我们的模型在许多具有挑战性的基准数据集上胜过了现有方法。

相关因素VAE：学习和识别解缠因素