# Towards Better Data Augmentation using Wasserstein Distance in Variational Auto-encoder

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14795 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14795/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)
- [VAE with a VampPrior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07120/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

VAE, or variational auto-encoder, compresses data into latent attributes, and generates new data of different varieties. VAE based on KL divergence has been considered as an effective technique for data augmentation. In this paper, we propose the use of Wasserstein distance as a measure of distributional similarity for the latent attributes, and show its superior theoretical lower bound (ELBO) compared with that of KL divergence under mild conditions. Using multiple experiments, we demonstrate that the new loss function exhibits better convergence property and generates artificial images that could better aid the image classification tasks.