An information maximization view on the $\beta$-VAE objective

guest post with Dóra JámborThis is a half-guest-post written jointly with Dóra, a fellow participant in a reading group where we recently discussed the original paper on $\beta$-VAEs:Irina Higgins et al (ICLR 2017): $\beta$-VAE: Learning Basic Visual Concepts with a Constrained Variational FrameworkOn the surface of it, $\beta$-VAEs are a straightforward extension of VAEs where we are allowed to directly control the tradeoff between the reconstruction and KL loss terms. In an attempt to better u...