Epitomic Variational Autoencoder

In this paper, we propose epitomic variational autoencoder (eVAE), a probabilistic generative model of high dimensional data. eVAE is composed of a number of sparse variational autoencoders called ‘epitome’ such that each epitome partially shares its encoder-decoder architecture with other epitomes in the composition. We show that the proposed model greatly overcomes the common problem in variational autoencoders (VAE) of model over-pruning. We substantiate that eVAE is efficient in using its model capacity and generalizes better than VAE, by presenting qualitative and quantitative results on MNIST and TFD datasets.