Branched Variational Autoencoder Classifiers

This paper introduces a modified variational autoencoder (VAEs) that contains an additional neural network branch. The resulting branched VAE (BVAE) contributes a classification component based on the class labels to the total loss and therefore imparts categorical information to the latent representation. As a result, the latent space distributions of the input classes are separated and ordered, thereby enhancing the classification accuracy. The degree of improvement is quantified by numerical calculations employing the benchmark MNIST dataset for both unrotated and rotated digits. The proposed technique is then compared to and then incorporated into a VAE with fixed output distributions. This procedure is found to yield improved performance for a wide range of output distributions.