why is there self.prior_ftr0 in the decoder model?

[Sadegh-Saberian]

Hello, great work! I am trying to understand NVAE, but I could not figure out the role of self.prior_ftr0 or h block in Fig2 in the decoder model. Correct me if im wrong, but i could not find any details regarding h in the paper; and the code defines it to be a random vector generated in the initialization of the model and then being used in the forward pass to kickstart the decoder model. my question is why did you chose this design rather than starting with just z1? Is there some part that Im missing here?

thank you so much for the great paper and repo.