Just an update on this, so I ran the classification test on the 64 bit latent space.  In the paper that’s the result on Table 1, row DIM(L) (NCE) , column CIFAR 10, Y(64)
I’ll put the results up, but I got a classification accuracy of 60.43, whereas they report 69.13 in the paper.
I’m not able to account for the difference as of yet, as they have not released their code.  So it’s possible they are doing something different than what I’m doing in the model.
Having said that, even 60 is a better result than what they report for the other encoding methods.  So it’s not all bad news.