  This report to our stage 1 submission to the NeurIPS 2019 disentanglement
challenge presents a simple image preprocessing method for training VAEs
leading to improved disentanglement compared to directly using the images. In
particular, we propose to use regionally aggregated feature maps extracted from
CNNs pretrained on ImageNet. Our method achieved the 2nd place in stage 1 of
the challenge. Code is available at
https://github.com/mseitzer/neurips2019-disentanglement-challenge.
