Variational Autoencoders Without the Variation

Abstract: Variational autoencdoers (VAE) are a popular approach to generative modelling. However, exploiting the capabilities of VAEs in practice can be difficult. Recent work on regularised and entropic autoencoders have begun to explore the potential, for generative modelling, of removing the variational approach and returning to the classic deterministic autoencoder (DAE) with additional novel regularisation methods. In this paper we empirically explore the capability of DAEs for image generation without additional novel methods and the effect of the implicit regularisation and smoothness of large networks. We find that DAEs can be used successfully for image generation without additional loss terms, and that many of the useful properties of VAEs can arise implicitly from sufficiently large convolutional encoders and decoders when trained on CIFAR-10 and CelebA.