Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

Spatial Broadcast Decoder: A Simple Architecture for Learning Disentangled Representations in VAEs

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 1901.07017 v2 pith:SMAMKRI2 submitted 2019-01-21 cs.LG cs.CVstat.ML

Spatial Broadcast Decoder: A Simple Architecture for Learning Disentangled Representations in VAEs

classification cs.LG cs.CVstat.ML
keywords broadcastdecodervaesarchitecturelatentrepresentationsspatialdata
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

We present a simple neural rendering architecture that helps variational autoencoders (VAEs) learn disentangled representations. Instead of the deconvolutional network typically used in the decoder of VAEs, we tile (broadcast) the latent vector across space, concatenate fixed X- and Y-"coordinate" channels, and apply a fully convolutional network with 1x1 stride. This provides an architectural prior for dissociating positional from non-positional features in the latent distribution of VAEs, yet without providing any explicit supervision to this effect. We show that this architecture, which we term the Spatial Broadcast decoder, improves disentangling, reconstruction accuracy, and generalization to held-out regions in data space. It provides a particularly dramatic benefit when applied to datasets with small objects. We also emphasize a method for visualizing learned latent spaces that helped us diagnose our models and may prove useful for others aiming to assess data representations. Finally, we show the Spatial Broadcast Decoder is complementary to state-of-the-art (SOTA) disentangling techniques and when incorporated improves their performance.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Loki: Representation over Architecture for Diffusion-Based Portrait Animation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Loki replaces RGB conditioning stacks with identity-orthogonal parametric face encodings rasterized for diffusion, achieving efficient cross-ID portrait animation without cross-ID training data.

  2. Learning Visually Interpretable Oscillator Networks for Soft Continuum Robots from Video

    cs.RO 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    ABCD and VONs enable visually and mechanically interpretable latent dynamics learning for soft robots from video, with reported multi-step prediction gains of 5.8x and 3.5x on two-segment cases.

  3. Rethinking Object-Centric Representations for Video Dynamics Modeling

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    STAITUS disentangles appearance from pose in video slots, enforces spatial separation and appearance-only temporal alignment, and adds adaptive gating to improve segmentation and identity persistence.

  4. Slot-MPC: Goal-Conditioned Model Predictive Control with Object-Centric Representations

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Slot-MPC learns slot representations to build a differentiable object-centric dynamics model that supports efficient gradient-based MPC for robotic manipulation in novel situations.

  5. Information theoretic underpinning of self-supervised learning by clustering

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    SSL clustering is derived as KL-divergence optimization where a teacher-distribution constraint normalizes via inverse cluster priors and simplifies to batch centering by Jensen's inequality.