$β$-CapsNet: Learning Disentangled Representation for CapsNet by Information Bottleneck

We present a framework for learning disentangled representation of CapsNet by information bottleneck constraint that distills information into a compact form and motivates to learn an interpretable factorized capsule. In our $\beta$-CapsNet framework, hyperparameter $\beta$ is utilized to trade-off disentanglement and other tasks, variational inference is utilized to convert the information bottleneck term into a KL divergence that is approximated as a constraint on the mean of the capsule. For supervised learning, class independent mask vector is used for understanding the types of variations synthetically irrespective of the image class, we carry out extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments by tuning the parameter $\beta$ to figure out the relationship between disentanglement, reconstruction and classfication performance. Furthermore, the unsupervised $\beta$-CapsNet and the corresponding dynamic routing algorithm is proposed for learning disentangled capsule in an unsupervised manner, extensive empirical evaluations suggest that our $\beta$-CapsNet achieves state-of-the-art disentanglement performance compared to CapsNet and various baselines on several complex datasets both in supervision and unsupervised scenes.