# Disentangling by Factorising

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05983 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05983/

## Key facts

- Cited by 616 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 616)

- [Towards Out-Of-Distribution Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13624/) (2021)
- [Sparse Feature Circuits: Discovering and Editing Interpretable Causal Graphs in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19647/) (2024)
- [Interpretable Machine Learning: Fundamental Principles and 10 Grand Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11251/) (2021)
- [Finding Neurons in a Haystack: Case Studies with Sparse Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01610/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Learning with Data Augmentations Provably Isolates Content from Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04619/) (2021)
- [From Anecdotal Evidence to Quantitative Evaluation Methods: A Systematic Review on Evaluating Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08164/) (2022)
- [Towards Causal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11107/) (2021)
- [Improving Dictionary Learning with Gated Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16014/) (2024)
- [The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15590/) (2021)
- [EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06635/) (2022)
- [A Fine-Grained Analysis on Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11328/) (2021)
- [StyleDiffusion: Controllable Disentangled Style Transfer via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07863/) (2023)
- [Illiterate DALL-E Learns to Compose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11405/) (2021)
- [Toward Transparent AI: A Survey on Interpreting the Inner Structures of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13243/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08629/) (2021)
- [Uncovering the Disentanglement Capability in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08698/) (2022)
- [A-SDF: Learning Disentangled Signed Distance Functions for Articulated Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07645/) (2021)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11695/) (2022)
- [Entropy is not Enough for Test-Time Adaptation: From the Perspective of Disentangled Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07366/) (2024)
- [Learning Temporally Causal Latent Processes from General Temporal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05428/) (2021)
- [Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14506/) (2022)
- [Compositional Abilities Emerge Multiplicatively: Exploring Diffusion Models on a Synthetic Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09336/) (2023)
- [Towards Principled Disentanglement for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13839/) (2021)
- [Generative Time Series Forecasting with Diffusion, Denoise, and Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03028/) (2023)
- [Object-Centric Slot Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10834/) (2023)
- [Generalization and Robustness Implications in Object-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00637/) (2021)
- [Desiderata for Representation Learning: A Causal Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03795/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Sparse Autoencoders: Interpreting the Internal Mechanisms of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05613/) (2025)
- [BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06169/) (2021)
- [Fair Contrastive Learning for Facial Attribute Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16209/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We define and address the problem of unsupervised learning of disentangled representations on data generated from independent factors of variation. We propose FactorVAE, a method that disentangles by encouraging the distribution of representations to be factorial and hence independent across the dimensions. We show that it improves upon β-VAE by providing a better trade-off between disentanglement and reconstruction quality. Moreover, we highlight the problems of a commonly used disentanglement metric and introduce a new metric that does not suffer from them.
