How to add flow priors to VAE

[DylanMannKrzisnik]

Hello,

What would be the simplest way of replacing a Gaussian prior for VAE with a flow-based one?

Thanks

[didriknielsen]

Hi,

I'd say the simplest would be to start from e.g. this example:
https://github.com/didriknielsen/survae_flows/blob/master/examples/mnist_vae.py
and add some bijective transformations after the VAE on line 50 (the layers are specified from data to latent, i.e. x -> z).

Alternatively, and equivalently, you can replace the base_distribution with a Flow.

Hope this helps. If it's not clear I post an example later.

Didrik

[DylanMannKrzisnik]

Thanks for your response, I had opted for the second option of replacing the base_distribution with a Flow. Much appreciated.