VAE Explainer: Supplement Learning Variational Autoencoders with Interactive Visualization

Abstract

Variational Autoencoders are widespread in Machine Learning, but are typically explained with dense math notation or static code examples. This paper presents VAE Explainer, an interactive Variational Autoencoder running in the browser to supplement existing static documentation (e.g., Keras Code Examples). VAE Explainer adds interactions to the VAE summary with interactive model inputs, latent space, and output. VAE Explainer connects the high-level understanding with the implementation: annotated code and a live computational graph. The VAE Explainer interactive visualization is live at https://xnought.github.io/vae-explainer and the code is open source at https://github.com/xnought/vae-explainer.