XFACTORS: Disentangled Information Bottleneck via Contrastive Supervision

arXiv:2601.21688v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Disentangled representation learning aims to map independent factors of variation to independent representation components. On one hand, purely unsupervised approaches have proven successful on fully disentangled synthetic data, but fail to recover semantic factors from real data without strong inductive biases. On the other hand, supervised approaches are unstable and hard to scale to large attribute sets because they rely on adversarial objectives or auxiliary classifiers.
We introduce textscXFactors, a weakly-supervised VAE framework that disentangles and provides explicit control over a chosen set of factors. Building on the Disentangled Information Bottleneck perspective, we decompose the representation into a residual subspace $mathcalS$ and factor-specific subspaces $mathcalT_1,ldots,mathcalT_K$ and a residual subspace $mathcalS$. Each target factor is encoded in its assigned $mathcalT_i$ through contrastive supervision: an InfoNCE loss pulls together latents sharing the same factor value and pushes apart mismatched pairs. In parallel, KL regularization imposes a Gaussian structure on both $mathcalS$ and the aggregated factor subspaces, organizing the geometry without additional supervision for non-targeted factors and avoiding adversarial training and classifiers.
Across multiple datasets, with constant hyperparameters, textscXFactors achieves state-of-the-art disentanglement scores and yields consistent qualitative factor alignment in the corresponding subspaces, enabling controlled factor swapping via latent replacement. We further demonstrate that our method scales correctly with increasing latent capacity and evaluate it on the real-world dataset CelebA. Our code is available at hrefhttps://github.com/ICML26-anon/XFactorsgithub.com/ICML26-anon/XFactors.