VQ-DRAW: A Sequential Discrete VAE
In this paper, I present VQ-DRAW, an algorithm for learning compact discrete representations of data. VQ-DRAW leverages a vector quantization effect to adapt the sequential generation scheme of DRAW to discrete latent variables. I show that VQ-DRAW can effectively learn to compress images from a variety of common datasets, as well as generate realistic samples from these datasets with no help from an autoregressive prior.
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