NeurIPS 2019 Disentanglement Challenge: Improved Disentanglement through Aggregated Convolutional Feature Maps

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.