  We propose the Variational Shape Learner (VSL), a generative model that
learns the underlying structure of voxelized 3D shapes in an unsupervised
fashion. Through the use of skip-connections, our model can successfully learn
and infer a latent, hierarchical representation of objects. Furthermore,
realistic 3D objects can be easily generated by sampling the VSL's latent
probabilistic manifold. We show that our generative model can be trained
end-to-end from 2D images to perform single image 3D model retrieval.
Experiments show, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the improved
generalization of our proposed model over a range of tasks, performing better
or comparable to various state-of-the-art alternatives.
