Disentangled representation learning aims to represent the underlying generative factors of a dataset in a latent representation independently of one another. In our work, we propose a discrete variational autoencoder (VAE) based model where the ground truth information about the generative factors are not provided to the model. We demonstrate the advantages of learning discrete representations over learning continuous representations in facilitating disentanglement. Furthermore, we propose incorporating an inductive bias into the model to further enhance disentanglement. Precisely, we propose scalar quantization of the latent variables in a latent representation with scalar values from a global codebook, and we add a total correlation term to the optimization as an inductive bias. Our method called FactorQVAE is the first method that combines optimization based disentanglement approaches with discrete representation learning, and it outperforms the former disentanglement methods in terms of two disentanglement metrics (DCI and InfoMEC) while improving the reconstruction performance. Our code can be found at \url{https://github.com/ituvisionlab/FactorQVAE}.

本研究解决了解耦表示学习中的真相信息缺失问题，提出了一种通过离散变分自编码器（VAE）来实现解耦的新方法。研究表明，结合全局代码簿的标量量化和总相关优化项能够显著提升解耦效果与重构性能，FactorQVAE方法在两个解耦指标上优于以往的解耦方法，具有重要的应用潜力。

因子量化变分自编码器的解耦