This paper introduces a new member of the family of Variational Autoencoders (VAE) that constrains the rate of information transferred by the latent layer. The latent layer is interpreted as a communication channel, the information rate of which is bound by imposing a pre-set signal-to-noise ratio. The new constraint subsumes the mutual information between the input and latent variables, combining naturally with the likelihood objective of the observed data as used in a conventional VAE. The resulting Bounded-Information-Rate Variational Autoencoder (BIR-VAE) provides a meaningful latent representation with an information resolution that can be specified directly in bits by the system designer. The rate constraint can be used to prevent overtraining, and the method naturally facilitates quantisation of the latent variables at the set rate. Our experiments confirm that the BIR-VAE has a meaningful latent representation and that its performance is at least as good as state-of-the-art competing algorithms, but with lower computational complexity.
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