While disentangled representations have shown promise in generative modeling and representation learning, their downstream usefulness remains debated. Recent studies re-defined disentanglement through a formal connection to symmetries, emphasizing the ability to reduce latent domains and consequently enhance generative capabilities. However, from an information theory viewpoint, assigning a complex attribute to a specific latent variable may be infeasible, limiting the applicability of disentangled representations to simple datasets. In this work, we introduce $\alpha$-TCVAE, a variational autoencoder optimized using a novel total correlation (TC) lower bound that maximizes disentanglement and latent variables informativeness. The proposed TC bound is grounded in information theory constructs, generalizes the $\beta$-VAE lower bound, and can be reduced to a convex combination of the known variational information bottleneck (VIB) and conditional entropy bottleneck (CEB) terms. Moreover, we present quantitative analyses that support the idea that disentangled representations lead to better generative capabilities and diversity. Additionally, we perform downstream task experiments from both representation and RL domains to assess our questions from a broader ML perspective. Our results demonstrate that $\alpha$-TCVAE consistently learns more disentangled representations than baselines and generates more diverse observations without sacrificing visual fidelity. Notably, $\alpha$-TCVAE exhibits marked improvements on MPI3D-Real, the most realistic disentangled dataset in our study, confirming its ability to represent complex datasets when maximizing the informativeness of individual variables. Finally, testing the proposed model off-the-shelf on a state-of-the-art model-based RL agent, Director, significantly shows $\alpha$-TCVAE downstream usefulness on the loconav Ant Maze task.

 本研究解决了解耦表示在生成建模中的有限适用性问题，通过引入一种新颖的总相关性下界（TC），优化变分自编码器（α-TCVAE），以最大化解耦和潜在变量的信息性。研究表明，α-TCVAE 在复杂数据集上能够学习到更加解耦的表示，并生成更多样化的观察结果，为机器学习领域提供了更好的生成能力和应用潜力。 

α-TCVAE：解耦与多样性之间的关系