# On Disentanglement in Gaussian Process Variational Autoencoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.05507 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05507/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00670/) (2016)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [Disentangling by Factorising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05983/) (2018)
- [Understanding disentangling in β-VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03599/) (2018)
- [Variational Inference of Disentangled Latent Concepts from Unlabeled Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00848/) (2017)
- [Weakly-Supervised Disentanglement Without Compromises](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02886/) (2020)
- [GP-VAE: Deep Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04155/) (2019)
- [Isolating Sources of Disentanglement in Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04942/) (2018)
- [On the Fairness of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13662/) (2019)
- [Recent Advances in Autoencoder-Based Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05069/) (2018)
- [Disentangled Sequential Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02991/) (2018)
- [Learning Deep Disentangled Embeddings with the F-Statistic Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05312/) (2018)
- [Are Disentangled Representations Helpful for Abstract Visual Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12506/) (2019)
- [Building machines that adapt and compute like brains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04203/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled and Interpretable Representations from Sequential Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07902/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11738/) (2018)
- [Disentangling Factors of Variation Using Few Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01258/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08359/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Inductive Biases for Factorial Representation-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05299/) (2016)
- [Sparse Gaussian Process Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10177/) (2020)
- [Scalable Gaussian Process Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13472/) (2020)
- [Factorized Gaussian Process Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07255/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11695/) (2022)
- [Priors in Bayesian Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06868/) (2021)
- [Algorithm Fairness in AI for Medicine and Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00603/) (2021)
- [Modeling Complex Disease Trajectories using Deep Generative Models with Semi-Supervised Latent Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08149/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Generative Models for Disease Trajectories: A Case Study on Systemic Sclerosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11427/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Complex multivariate time series arise in many fields, ranging from computer vision to robotics or medicine. Often we are interested in the independent underlying factors that give rise to the high-dimensional data we are observing. While many models have been introduced to learn such disentangled representations, only few attempt to explicitly exploit the structure of sequential data. We investigate the disentanglement properties of Gaussian process variational autoencoders, a class of models recently introduced that have been successful in different tasks on time series data. Our model exploits the temporal structure of the data by modeling each latent channel with a GP prior and employing a structured variational distribution that can capture dependencies in time. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach against state-of-the-art unsupervised and weakly-supervised disentanglement methods on a benchmark task. Moreover, we provide evidence that we can learn meaningful disentangled representations on real-world medical time series data.