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 $beta$-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.
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