Topic-VQ-VAE: Leveraging Latent Codebooks for Flexible Topic-Guided
  Document Generation
Authors: name: YoungJoon Yoo, name: Jongwon Choi

This paper introduces a novel approach for topic modeling utilizing latent
codebooks from Vector-Quantized Variational Auto-Encoder~(VQ-VAE), discretely
encapsulating the rich information of the pre-trained embeddings such as the
pre-trained language model. From the novel interpretation of the latent
codebooks and embeddings as conceptual bag-of-words, we propose a new
generative topic model called Topic-VQ-VAE~(TVQ-VAE) which inversely generates
the original documents related to the respective latent codebook. The TVQ-VAE
can visualize the topics with various generative distributions including the
traditional BoW distribution and the autoregressive image generation. Our
experimental results on document analysis and image generation demonstrate that
TVQ-VAE effectively captures the topic context which reveals the underlying
structures of the dataset and supports flexible forms of document generation.
Official implementation of the proposed TVQ-VAE is available at
https://github.com/clovaai/TVQ-VAE.