We compare our HR-VAE model with three strong baselines using VAE for text modelling:

VAE-LSTM-base: A variational autoencoder model which uses LSTM for both encoder and decoder. KL annealing is used to tackled the latent variable collapse issue BIBREF0;

VAE-CNN: A variational autoencoder model with a LSTM encoder and a dilated CNN decoder BIBREF7;

vMF-VAE: 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 BIBREF5. 
 Question: Do they compare against state of the art text generation?
Yes