We compare our HR-VAE model with three strong baselines using VAE for text modelling: VAE-LSTM-base 3 : A variational autoencoder model which uses LSTM for both encoder and decoder. KL annealing is used to tackled the latent variable collapse issue (Bowman et al., 2016) ; VAE-CNN 4 : A variational autoencoder model with a LSTM encoder and a dilated CNN decoder (Yang et al., 2017) ; vMF-VAE 5 : A variational autoencoder model using LSTM for both encoder and decoder where the prior distribution is the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution rather than a Gaussian distribution (<cite>Xu and Durrett, 2018</cite>) .