English

From Core to Detail: Unsupervised Disentanglement with Entropy-Ordered Flows

Machine Learning 2026-02-09 v1

Abstract

Learning unsupervised representations that are both semantically meaningful and stable across runs remains a central challenge in modern representation learning. We introduce entropy-ordered flows (EOFlows), a normalizing-flow framework that orders latent dimensions by their explained entropy, analogously to PCA's explained variance. This ordering enables adaptive injective flows: after training, one may retain only the top C latent variables to form a compact core representation while the remaining variables capture fine-grained detail and noise, with C chosen flexibly at inference time rather than fixed during training. EOFlows build on insights from Independent Mechanism Analysis, Principal Component Flows and Manifold Entropic Metrics. We combine likelihood-based training with local Jacobian regularization and noise augmentation into a method that scales well to high-dimensional data such as images. Experiments on the CelebA dataset show that our method uncovers a rich set of semantically interpretable features, allowing for high compression and strong denoising.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.06940,
  title  = {From Core to Detail: Unsupervised Disentanglement with Entropy-Ordered Flows},
  author = {Daniel Galperin and Ullrich Köthe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.06940},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:24:51.448Z