Polarized-VAE: Proximity Based Disentangled Representation Learning for Text Generation

Learning disentangled representations of real world data is a challenging open problem. Most previous methods have focused on either fully supervised approaches which use attribute labels or unsupervised approaches that manipulate the factorization in the latent space of models such as the variational autoencoder (VAE), by training with task-specific losses. In this work we propose polarized-VAE, a novel approach that disentangles selected attributes in the latent space based on proximity measures reflecting the similarity between data points with respect to these attributes. We apply our method to disentangle the semantics and syntax of a sentence and carry out transfer experiments. Polarized-VAE significantly outperforms the VAE baseline and is competitive with the state-of-the-art approaches, while being more a general framework that is applicable to other attribute disentanglement tasks.