Disentangled representation learning has undoubtedly benefited from objective function surgery. However, a delicate balancing act of tuning is still required in order to trade off reconstruction fidelity versus disentanglement. Building on previous successes of penalizing the total correlation in the latent variables, we propose TCWAE (Total Correlation Wasserstein Autoencoder). Working in the WAE paradigm naturally enables the separation of the total-correlation term, thus providing disentanglement control over the learned representation, while offering more flexibility in the choice of reconstruction cost. We propose two variants using different KL estimators and perform extensive quantitative comparisons on data sets with known generative factors, showing competitive results relative to state-of-the-art techniques. We further study the trade off between disentanglement and reconstruction on more-difficult data sets with unknown generative factors, where the flexibility of the WAE paradigm in the reconstruction term improves reconstructions.

该论文提出了 TCWAE 方法，使用 WAE 框架在潜在变量上分离了总相关项，从而在保持重构精度的同时提供了对学习表示的解缠结控制，同时在选择重构成本方面提供了更大的灵活性，并在已知生成因素的数据集上进行了大量的量化比较，取得了与最先进技术相比具有竞争力的结果。

使用Wasserstein自编码器学习解耦表示