We present a new flavor of Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that interpolates seamlessly between unsupervised, semi-supervised and fully supervised learning domains. We show that unlabeled datapoints not only boost unsupervised tasks, but also the classification performance. Vice versa, every label not only improves classification, but also unsupervised tasks. The proposed architecture is simple: A classification layer is connected to the topmost encoder layer, and then combined with the resampled latent layer for the decoder. The usual evidence lower bound (ELBO) loss is supplemented with a supervised loss target on this classification layer that is only applied for labeled datapoints. This simplicity allows for extending any existing VAE model to our proposed semi-supervised framework with minimal effort. In the context of classification, we found that this approach even outperforms a direct supervised setup.
We study a variant of the variational autoencoder model (VAE) with a Gaussian mixture as a prior distribution, with the goal of performing unsupervised clustering through deep generative models. We observe that the known problem of over-regularisation that has been shown to arise in regular VAEs also manifests itself in our model and leads to cluster degeneracy. We show that a heuristic called minimum information constraint that has been shown to mitigate this effect in VAEs can also be applied to improve unsupervised clustering performance with our model. Furthermore we analyse the effect of …
Exemplar-based methods rely on informative data points or prototypes to guide the optimization of learning algorithms. Such data facilitate interpretable model design and prediction. Of particular interest is the utility of exemplars in learning unsupervised deep representations. In this paper, we leverage hubs, which emerge as frequent neighbors in high-dimensional spaces, as exemplars to regularize a variational autoencoder and to learn a discriminative embedding for unsupervised down-stream tasks. We propose an unsupervised, data-driven regularization of the latent space with a mixture of h…
German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)（德国癌症研究中心（DKFZ））
Unsupervised learning can leverage large-scale data sources without the need for annotations. In this context, deep learning-based auto encoders have shown great potential in detecting anomalies in medical images. However, state-of-the-art anomaly scores are still based on the reconstruction error, which lacks in two essential parts: it ignores the model-internal representation employed for reconstruction, and it lacks formal assertions and comparability between samples. We address these shortcomings by proposing the Context-encoding Variational Autoencoder (ceVAE) which combines reconstructio…
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.（三星电子株式会社）
In this paper, we propose Squeezed Convolutional Variational AutoEncoder (SCVAE) for anomaly detection in time series data for Edge Computing in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The proposed model is applied to labeled time series data from UCI datasets for exact performance evaluation, and applied to real world data for indirect model performance comparison. In addition, by comparing the models before and after applying Fire Modules from SqueezeNet, we show that model size and inference times are reduced while similar levels of performance is maintained.
In this paper we propose an artificial intelligence imaging solution to support archaeologists in the classification task of Roman commonware potsherds. Usually, each potsherd is represented by its sectional profile as a two dimensional black-white image and printed in archaeological books related to specific archaeological excavations. The partiality and handcrafted variance of the fragments make their matching a challenging problem: we propose to pair similar profiles via the unsupervised hierarchical clustering of non-linear features learned in the latent space of a deep convolutional Varia…
In this paper, we present an unsupervised probabilistic model and associated estimation algorithm for multi-object tracking (MOT) based on a dynamical variational autoencoder (DVAE), called DVAE-UMOT. The DVAE is a latent-variable deep generative model that can be seen as an extension of the variational autoencoder for the modeling of temporal sequences. It is included in DVAE-UMOT to model the objects' dynamics, after being pre-trained on an unlabeled synthetic dataset of single-object trajectories. Then the distributions and parameters of DVAE-UMOT are estimated on each multi-object sequence…
PhyloVAE: Unsupervised Learning of Phylogenetic Trees via Variational Autoencoders
School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University（北京大学数学科学学院）；Center for Statistical Science, Peking University（北京大学统计科学中心）；Computational Biology Program, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center（弗雷德·哈钦森癌症研究中心计算生物学项目）；Howard Hughes Medical Institute（霍华德·休斯医学研究所）
Recently, an audio-visual speech generative model based on variational autoencoder (VAE) has been proposed, which is combined with a nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) model for noise variance to perform unsupervised speech enhancement. When visual data is clean, speech enhancement with audio-visual VAE shows a better performance than with audio-only VAE, which is trained on audio-only data. However, audio-visual VAE is not robust against noisy visual data, e.g., when for some video frames, speaker face is not frontal or lips region is occluded. In this paper, we propose a robust unsupervi…
Domain mismatch between training and testing can lead to significant degradation in performance in many machine learning scenarios. Unfortunately, this is not a rare situation for automatic speech recognition deployments in real-world applications. Research on robust speech recognition can be regarded as trying to overcome this domain mismatch issue. In this paper, we address the unsupervised domain adaptation problem for robust speech recognition, where both source and target domain speech are presented, but word transcripts are only available for the source domain speech. We present novel au…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
Deep Learning (DL) methods have dramatically increased in popularity in recent years. While its initial success was demonstrated in the classification and manipulation of image data, there has been significant growth in the application of DL methods to problems in the biomedical sciences. However, the greater prevalence and complexity of missing data in biomedical datasets present significant challenges for DL methods. Here, we provide a formal treatment of missing data in the context of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), a popular unsupervised DL architecture commonly utilized for dimension red…
The unsupervised training of GANs and VAEs has enabled them to generate realistic images mimicking real-world distributions and perform image-based unsupervised clustering or semi-supervised classification. Combining the power of these two generative models, we introduce Multi-Adversarial Variational autoEncoder Networks (MAVENs), a novel network architecture that incorporates an ensemble of discriminators in a VAE-GAN network, with simultaneous adversarial learning and variational inference. We apply MAVENs to the generation of synthetic images and propose a new distribution measure to quanti…
A new approach for blind channel equalization and decoding, variational inference, and variational autoencoders (VAEs) in particular, is introduced. We first consider the reconstruction of uncoded data symbols transmitted over a noisy linear intersymbol interference (ISI) channel, with an unknown impulse response, without using pilot symbols. We derive an approximate maximum likelihood estimate to the channel parameters and reconstruct the transmitted data. We demonstrate significant and consistent improvements in the error rate of the reconstructed symbols, compared to existing blind equaliza…
Center for Systems Biology Dresden（德累斯顿系统生物学中心）；Max-Planck Institute (CBG)（马克斯·普朗克分子细胞生物学与遗传学研究所）；School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Fondazione Human Technopole（人类技术基金会）
Deep Learning based methods have emerged as the indisputable leaders for virtually all image restoration tasks. Especially in the domain of microscopy images, various content-aware image restoration (CARE) approaches are now used to improve the interpretability of acquired data. Naturally, there are limitations to what can be restored in corrupted images, and like for all inverse problems, many potential solutions exist, and one of them must be chosen. Here, we propose DivNoising, a denoising approach based on fully convolutional variational autoencoders (VAEs), overcoming the problem of havin…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
The Monte Carlo dropout method has proved to be a scalable and easy-to-use approach for estimating the uncertainty of deep neural network predictions. This approach was recently applied to Fault Detection and Di-agnosis (FDD) applications to improve the classification performance on incipient faults. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of augmenting the classification model with an additional unsupervised learning task. We justify our choice of algorithm design via an information-theoretical analysis. Our experimental results on three datasets from diverse application domains show that …
The brain performs unsupervised learning and (perhaps) simultaneous supervised learning. This raises the question as to whether a hybrid of supervised and unsupervised methods will produce better learning. Inspired by the rich space of Hebbian learning rules, we set out to directly learn the unsupervised learning rule on local information that best augments a supervised signal. We present the Hebbian-augmented training algorithm (HAT) for combining gradient-based learning with an unsupervised rule on pre-synpatic activity, post-synaptic activities, and current weights. We test HAT's effect on …
Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院维特比电气与电子工程学院）
Autoencoders are widely used for unsupervised learning and as a regularization scheme in semi-supervised learning. However, theoretical understanding of their generalization properties and of the manner in which they can assist supervised learning has been lacking. We utilize recent advances in the theory of deep learning generalization, together with a novel reconstruction loss, to provide generalization bounds for autoencoders. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such bound. We further show that, under appropriate assumptions, an autoencoder with good generalization properties ca…
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）；University of L’Aquila（拉奎拉大学）
Autoencoders, as a dimensionality reduction technique, have been recently applied to outlier detection. However, neural networks are known to be vulnerable to overfitting, and therefore have limited potential in the unsupervised outlier detection setting. Current approaches to ensemble-based autoencoders do not generate a sufficient level of diversity to avoid the overfitting issue. To overcome the aforementioned limitations we develop a Boosting-based Autoencoder Ensemble approach (in short, BAE). BAE is an unsupervised ensemble method that, similarly to the boosting approach, builds an adapt…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Technicolor（特艺集团）；Adobe（Adobe公司）
Unsupervised clustering is one of the most fundamental challenges in machine learning. A popular hypothesis is that data are generated from a union of low-dimensional nonlinear manifolds; thus an approach to clustering is identifying and separating these manifolds. In this paper, we present a novel approach to solve this problem by using a mixture of autoencoders. Our model consists of two parts: 1) a collection of autoencoders where each autoencoder learns the underlying manifold of a group of similar objects, and 2) a mixture assignment neural network, which takes the concatenated latent vec…
Unsupervised learning and supervised learning are key research topics in deep learning. However, as high-capacity supervised neural networks trained with a large amount of labels have achieved remarkable success in many computer vision tasks, the availability of large-scale labeled images reduced the significance of unsupervised learning. Inspired by the recent trend toward revisiting the importance of unsupervised learning, we investigate joint supervised and unsupervised learning in a large-scale setting by augmenting existing neural networks with decoding pathways for reconstruction. First,…
When deep learning is applied to visual object recognition, data augmentation is often used to generate additional training data without extra labeling cost. It helps to reduce overfitting and increase the performance of the algorithm. In this paper we investigate if it is possible to use data augmentation as the main component of an unsupervised feature learning architecture. To that end we sample a set of random image patches and declare each of them to be a separate single-image surrogate class. We then extend these trivial one-element classes by applying a variety of transformations to the…
High-dimensional data in many areas such as computer vision and machine learning tasks brings in computational and analytical difficulty. Feature selection which selects a subset from observed features is a widely used approach for improving performance and effectiveness of machine learning models with high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose a novel AutoEncoder Feature Selector (AEFS) for unsupervised feature selection which combines autoencoder regression and group lasso tasks. Compared to traditional feature selection methods, AEFS can select the most important features by excavatin…
Text autoencoders are often used for unsupervised conditional text generation by applying mappings in the latent space to change attributes to the desired values. Recently, Mai et al. (2020) proposed Emb2Emb, a method to learn these mappings in the embedding space of an autoencoder. However, their method is restricted to autoencoders with a single-vector embedding, which limits how much information can be retained. We address this issue by extending their method to Bag-of-Vectors Autoencoders (BoV-AEs), which encode the text into a variable-size bag of vectors that grows with the size of the t…
We show how a deep denoising autoencoder with lateral connections can be used as an auxiliary unsupervised learning task to support supervised learning. The proposed model is trained to minimize simultaneously the sum of supervised and unsupervised cost functions by back-propagation, avoiding the need for layer-wise pretraining. It improves the state of the art significantly in the permutation-invariant MNIST classification task.
This paper proposes an autoencoder (AE) that is used for improving the performance of once-class classifiers for the purpose of detecting anomalies. Traditional one-class classifiers (OCCs) perform poorly under certain conditions such as high-dimensionality and sparsity. Also, the size of the training set plays an important role on the performance of one-class classifiers. Autoencoders have been widely used for obtaining useful latent variables from high-dimensional datasets. In the proposed approach, the AE is capable of deriving meaningful features from high-dimensional datasets while doing …
This paper presents a novel framework for unsupervised anomaly detection on masked objects called ODDObjects, which stands for Out-of-Distribution Detection on Objects. ODDObjects is designed to detect anomalies of various categories using unsupervised autoencoders trained on COCO-style datasets. The method utilizes autoencoder-based image reconstruction, where high reconstruction error indicates the possibility of an anomaly. The framework extends previous work on anomaly detection with autoencoders, comparing state-of-the-art models trained on object recognition datasets. Various model archi…
Dimensionality reduction is a crucial first step for many unsupervised learning tasks including anomaly detection and clustering. Autoencoder is a popular mechanism to accomplish dimensionality reduction. In order to make dimensionality reduction effective for high-dimensional data embedding nonlinear low-dimensional manifold, it is understood that some sort of geodesic distance metric should be used to discriminate the data samples. Inspired by the success of geodesic distance approximators such as ISOMAP, we propose to use a minimum spanning tree (MST), a graph-based algorithm, to approximat…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
In this paper, we propose Normality-Calibrated Autoencoder (NCAE), which can boost anomaly detection performance on the contaminated datasets without any prior information or explicit abnormal samples in the training phase. The NCAE adversarially generates high confident normal samples from a latent space having low entropy and leverages them to predict abnormal samples in a training dataset. NCAE is trained to minimise reconstruction errors in uncontaminated samples and maximise reconstruction errors in contaminated samples. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms sha…
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Heidelberg（海德堡大学理论物理研究所）
We employ unsupervised machine learning techniques to learn latent parameters which best describe states of the two-dimensional Ising model and the three-dimensional XY model. These methods range from principal component analysis to artificial neural network based variational autoencoders. The states are sampled using a Monte-Carlo simulation above and below the critical temperature. We find that the predicted latent parameters correspond to the known order parameters. The latent representation of the states of the models in question are clustered, which makes it possible to identify phases wi…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Despite their successes, deep neural networks may make unreliable predictions when faced with test data drawn from a distribution different to that of the training data, constituting a major problem for AI safety. While this has recently motivated the development of methods to detect such out-of-distribution (OoD) inputs, a robust solution is still lacking. We propose a new probabilistic, unsupervised approach to this problem based on a Bayesian variational autoencoder model, which estimates a full posterior distribution over the decoder parameters using stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte …
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（赛富时亚洲研究院）
Adversarial training has shown impressive success in learning bilingual dictionary without any parallel data by mapping monolingual embeddings to a shared space. However, recent work has shown superior performance for non-adversarial methods in more challenging language pairs. In this work, we revisit adversarial autoencoder for unsupervised word translation and propose two novel extensions to it that yield more stable training and improved results. Our method includes regularization terms to enforce cycle consistency and input reconstruction, and puts the target encoders as an adversary again…
We propose an unsupervised method using self-clustering convolutional adversarial autoencoders to classify prostate tissue as tumor or non-tumor without any labeled training data. The clustering method is integrated into the training of the autoencoder and requires only little post-processing. Our network trains on hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) input patches and we tested two different reconstruction targets, H&E and immunohistochemistry (IHC). We show that antibody-driven feature learning using IHC helps the network to learn relevant features for the clustering task. Our network achieves a F1 s…
This paper aims to improve the explainability of Autoencoder's (AE) predictions by proposing two explanation methods based on the mean and epistemic uncertainty of log-likelihood estimate, which naturally arise from the probabilistic formulation of the AE called Bayesian Autoencoders (BAE). To quantitatively evaluate the performance of explanation methods, we test them in sensor network applications, and propose three metrics based on covariate shift of sensors : (1) G-mean of Spearman drift coefficients, (2) G-mean of sensitivity-specificity of explanation ranking and (3) sensor explanation q…
We aim to build image generation models that generalize to new domains from few examples. To this end, we first investigate the generalization properties of classic image generators, and discover that autoencoders generalize extremely well to new domains, even when trained on highly constrained data. We leverage this insight to produce a robust, unsupervised few-shot image generation algorithm, and introduce a novel training procedure based on recovering an image from data augmentations. Our Augmentation-Interpolative AutoEncoders synthesize realistic images of novel objects from only a few re…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Hanyang University（汉阳大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）
We propose a symmetric graph convolutional autoencoder which produces a low-dimensional latent representation from a graph. In contrast to the existing graph autoencoders with asymmetric decoder parts, the proposed autoencoder has a newly designed decoder which builds a completely symmetric autoencoder form. For the reconstruction of node features, the decoder is designed based on Laplacian sharpening as the counterpart of Laplacian smoothing of the encoder, which allows utilizing the graph structure in the whole processes of the proposed autoencoder architecture. In order to prevent the numer…
We introduce a framework for unsupervised learning of structured predictors with overlapping, global features. Each input's latent representation is predicted conditional on the observable data using a feature-rich conditional random field. Then a reconstruction of the input is (re)generated, conditional on the latent structure, using models for which maximum likelihood estimation has a closed-form. Our autoencoder formulation enables efficient learning without making unrealistic independence assumptions or restricting the kinds of features that can be used. We illustrate insightful connection…
Cross-dataset transfer learning is an important problem in person re-identification (Re-ID). Unfortunately, not too many deep transfer Re-ID models exist for realistic settings of practical Re-ID systems. We propose a purely deep transfer Re-ID model consisting of a deep convolutional neural network and an autoencoder. The latent code is divided into metric embedding and nuisance variables. We then utilize an unsupervised training method that does not rely on co-training with non-deep models. Our experiments show improvements over both the baseline and competitors' transfer learning models.
Quadratic Neuron-empowered Heterogeneous Autoencoder for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Weill Cornell Medicine（威尔康奈尔医学院）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition Group（人类语言技术与模式识别小组）
Unsupervised learning of cross-lingual word embedding offers elegant matching of words across languages, but has fundamental limitations in translating sentences. In this paper, we propose simple yet effective methods to improve word-by-word translation of cross-lingual embeddings, using only monolingual corpora but without any back-translation. We integrate a language model for context-aware search, and use a novel denoising autoencoder to handle reordering. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art unsupervised neural translation systems without costly iterative training. We also analyze the eff…
School of Computing（计算机学院）；NUS Graduate School（新加坡国立大学研究生院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
We propose the Motion Capsule Autoencoder (MCAE), which addresses a key challenge in the unsupervised learning of motion representations: transformation invariance. MCAE models motion in a two-level hierarchy. In the lower level, a spatio-temporal motion signal is divided into short, local, and semantic-agnostic snippets. In the higher level, the snippets are aggregated to form full-length semantic-aware segments. For both levels, we represent motion with a set of learned transformation invariant templates and the corresponding geometric transformations by using capsule autoencoders of a novel…
Anomalous sound detection (ASD) is, nowadays, one of the topical subjects in machine listening discipline. Unsupervised detection is attracting a lot of interest due to its immediate applicability in many fields. For example, related to industrial processes, the early detection of malfunctions or damage in machines can mean great savings and an improvement in the efficiency of industrial processes. This problem can be solved with an unsupervised ASD solution since industrial machines will not be damaged simply by having this audio data in the training stage. This paper proposes a novel framewo…
Learning disentangled representation from any unlabelled data is a non-trivial problem. In this paper we propose Information Maximising Autoencoder (InfoAE) where the encoder learns powerful disentangled representation through maximizing the mutual information between the representation and given information in an unsupervised fashion. We have evaluated our model on MNIST dataset and achieved 98.9 ($\pm .1$) $\%$ test accuracy while using complete unsupervised training.
University of Maryland College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Detecting out of distribution (OOD) samples is of paramount importance in all Machine Learning applications. Deep generative modeling has emerged as a dominant paradigm to model complex data distributions without labels. However, prior work has shown that generative models tend to assign higher likelihoods to OOD samples compared to the data distribution on which they were trained. First, we propose Adversarial Mirrored Autoencoder (AMA), a variant of Adversarial Autoencoder, which uses a mirrored Wasserstein loss in the discriminator to enforce better semantic-level reconstruction. We also pr…
CCG ZGDV Institute（CCG ZGDV研究所）；Bosch Car Multimedia, Portugal（博世汽车多媒体（葡萄牙）公司）
This technical report describes two methods that were developed for Task 2 of the DCASE 2020 challenge. The challenge involves an unsupervised learning to detect anomalous sounds, thus only normal machine working condition samples are available during the training process. The two methods involve deep autoencoders, based on dense and convolutional architectures that use melspectogram processed sound features. Experiments were held, using the six machine type datasets of the challenge. Overall, competitive results were achieved by the proposed dense and convolutional AE, outperforming the basel…
Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）；Huawei Cloud Database Innovation Lab（华为云数据库创新实验室）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Time series data occurs widely, and outlier detection is a fundamental problem in data mining, which has numerous applications. Existing autoencoder-based approaches deliver state-of-the-art performance on challenging real-world data but are vulnerable to outliers and exhibit low explainability. To address these two limitations, we propose robust and explainable unsupervised autoencoder frameworks that decompose an input time series into a clean time series and an outlier time series using autoencoders. Improved explainability is achieved because clean time series are better explained with eas…
