  The recent rise in deep learning technologies fueled innovation and boosted
scientific research. Their achievements enabled new research directions for
deep generative modeling (DGM), an increasingly popular approach that can
create novel and unseen data, starting from a given data set. As the technology
shows promising applications, many ethical issues also arise. For example,
their misuse can enable disinformation campaigns and powerful phishing
attempts. Research also indicates different biases affect deep learning models,
leading to social issues such as misrepresentation. In this work, we formulate
a novel setting to deal with similar problems, showing that a repurposed
anomaly detection system effectively generates novel data, avoiding generating
specified unwanted data. We propose Variational Auto-encoding Binary
Classifiers (V-ABC): a novel model that repurposes and extends the
Auto-encoding Binary Classifier (ABC) anomaly detector, using the Variational
Auto-encoder (VAE). We survey the limitations of existing approaches and
explore many tools to show the model's inner workings in an interpretable way.
This proposal has excellent potential for generative applications: models that
rely on user-generated data could automatically filter out unwanted content,
such as offensive language, obscene images, and misleading information.
