Conformal Disentanglement and Latent-Space Curation: A Neural Framework for Perspective Synthesis, Differentiation and Targeted Generation

arXiv:2408.15344v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many scientific and engineering problems involve observing a common phenomenon through multiple heterogeneous sensors or measurement modalities. Such observations typically contain both information shared across sensors, reflecting the underlying system, and sensor-specific or extraneous components arising from measurement processes or environmental effects. Disentangling these contributions is essential when sensor-independent observations are unavailable. We propose a neural autoencoder framework that explicitly separates shared and sensor-specific latent variables from multi-sensor data. The architecture enforces geometric independence between latent components through structural constraints and orthogonality-based regularization, yielding interpretable and disentangled representations. Building on this representation, we then introduce a latent-space generative methodology in which generative models are tuned/"restricted" on selected disentangled latent subspaces; we then constructively combine disentangled observed latent variables to conditionally synthesize new samples via trained decoders. This enables consistent data generation with prescribed shared (or sensor-specific) characteristics. It also supports cross-sensor inference by consistently sampling distributions over plausible measurements in unobserved modalities. We demonstrate the approach on several computational examples, showing effective disentanglement, targeted data generation, and modality imputation in heterogeneous sensing settings.