Make sure you have all the packages in requirements.txt installed. You may use the
pip3 install -r requirements.txt command.
After installation, run the run_vae.py file. Inside the file you can find the necessary configuration parameters for the VAE. Setting the training flag to 0, will trigger the evaluation and a plot of 200 samples is saved in the project directory.
If the latent (z) dimension is 2, in addition, you can find a plot of the distributions of the real digits in the latent space.
If you decide to trainn your own VAE, it should only take about 5min.