Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes, Diederik P. Kingma and Max Welling, 2014International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1312.6114 - Introduces Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), discussing the reconstruction objective and latent space regularization through the ELBO, which relates to information-theoretic measures.
Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, and Pascal Vincent, 2013IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), Vol. 35 (IEEE)DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2013.50 - A seminal review paper that discusses various aspects of representation learning, including the desire for disentanglement and the utility of representations for downstream tasks.