Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models that have been
widely used in various fields, including image and text generation. However,
one of the known challenges in using VAEs is the model's sensitivity to its
hyperparameters, such as the latent space size. This paper presents a simple
extension of VAEs for automatically determining the optimal latent space size
during the training process by gradually decreasing the latent size through
neuron removal and observing the model performance. The proposed method is
compared to traditional hyperparameter grid search and is shown to be
significantly faster while still achieving the best optimal dimensionality on
four image datasets. Furthermore, we show that the final performance of our
method is comparable to training on the optimal latent size from scratch, and
might thus serve as a convenient substitute.

这篇文章介绍了一种对变分自动编码器 (VAEs) 进行简单扩展的方法，通过渐进性减小潜空间大小来自动确定训练过程中的最佳潜空间大小，并将该方法与传统的超参数网格搜索进行比较，结果表明其速度显著更快，且在四个图像数据集上实现了最佳的维度。此外，还证明了我们方法的最终性能与从头开始训练的最佳潜空间大小相当，因此可能作为一种便利的替代方法。

变分自编码器中潜空间的自适应压缩

Adaptive Compression of the Latent Space in Variational Autoencoders

Deep Neural nets (NNs) with millions of parameters are at the heart of many
state-of-the-art computer vision systems today. However, recent works have
shown that much smaller models can achieve similar levels of performance. In
this work, we address the problem of pruning parameters in a trained NN model.
Instead of removing individual weights one at a time as done in previous works,
we remove one neuron at a time. We show how similar neurons are redundant, and
propose a systematic way to remove them. Our experiments in pruning the densely
connected layers show that we can remove upto 85\% of the total parameters in
an MNIST-trained network, and about 35\% for AlexNet without significantly
affecting performance. Our method can be applied on top of most networks with a
fully connected layer to give a smaller network.

本研究探讨在已训练的神经网络模型中修剪神经元的问题并提出了一种系统性的方式去除冗余的相似神经元，并且通过在 MNIST 训练网络中修剪密集连接层，达到 85％ 的总参数去除率，在 AlexNet 上达到 35％去除率，并且没有明显影响其性能。