From Autoencoder to Beta-VAE

lilianweng.github.io

[Updated on 2019-07-18: add a section on VQ-VAE & VQ-VAE-2.] [Updated on 2019-07-26: add a section on TD-VAE.] Autocoder is invented to reconstruct high-dimensional data using a neural network model with a narrow bottleneck layer in the middle (oops, this is probably not true for Variational Autoencoder, and we will investigate it in details in later sections). A nice byproduct is dimension reduction: the bottleneck layer captures a compressed latent encoding. Such a low-dimensional representation can be used as en embedding vector in various applications (i.e. search), help data compression, or reveal the underlying data generative factors.