  Learning from multiple sources of information is an important problem in
machine-learning research. The key challenges are learning representations and
formulating inference methods that take into account the complementarity and
redundancy of various information sources. In this paper we formulate a
variational autoencoder based multi-source learning framework in which each
encoder is conditioned on a different information source. This allows us to
relate the sources via the shared latent variables by computing divergence
measures between individual source's posterior approximations. We explore a
variety of options to learn these encoders and to integrate the beliefs they
compute into a consistent posterior approximation. We visualise learned beliefs
on a toy dataset and evaluate our methods for learning shared representations
and structured output prediction, showing trade-offs of learning separate
encoders for each information source. Furthermore, we demonstrate how conflict
detection and redundancy can increase robustness of inference in a multi-source
setting.
