<p>No, it is not uncommon to have asymmetric architectures, e.g. [1, 2, 3, etc.].</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Tang, Shuai, et al. "Exploring Asymmetric Encoder-Decoder Structure for Context-based Sentence Representation Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10380 (2017). <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10380.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">pdf</a></p></li>
<li><p>LiNalisnick, Eric, and Padhraic Smyth. "Stick-breaking variational autoencoders." International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). 2017. <a href="https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10039928" rel="nofollow noreferrer">pdf</a></p></li>
<li><p>Nash, Charlie, and Chris KI Williams. "The shape variational autoencoder: A deep generative model of part‐segmented 3D objects." Computer Graphics Forum. Vol. 36. No. 5. 2017. <a href="http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/ckiw/postscript/sgp2017.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">pdf</a></p></li>
</ol>
Variational autoencoder: Does encoder must have the same number of layers as the decoder?
<p>Does encoder must have the same number of layers as the decoder, in Variational Autoencoder? I got a little better result with the encoder (Dense): 54-10-5-3 and Decoder (Dense): 3-5-10-25-35-45-54</p>