  Learning disentangled representations from visual data, where different
high-level generative factors are independently encoded, is of importance for
many computer vision tasks. Solving this problem, however, typically requires
to explicitly label all the factors of interest in training images. To
alleviate the annotation cost, we introduce a learning setting which we refer
to as "reference-based disentangling". Given a pool of unlabeled images, the
goal is to learn a representation where a set of target factors are
disentangled from others. The only supervision comes from an auxiliary
"reference set" containing images where the factors of interest are constant.
In order to address this problem, we propose reference-based variational
autoencoders, a novel deep generative model designed to exploit the
weak-supervision provided by the reference set. By addressing tasks such as
feature learning, conditional image generation or attribute transfer, we
validate the ability of the proposed model to learn disentangled
representations from this minimal form of supervision.
