Computer simulations have become a popular tool of assessing complex skills such as problem-solving skills. Log files of computer-based items record the entire human-computer interactive processes for each respondent. The response processes are very diverse, noisy, and of nonstandard formats. Few generic methods have been developed for exploiting the information contained in process data. In this article, we propose a method to extract latent variables from process data. The method utilizes a sequence-to-sequence autoencoder to compress response processes into standard numerical vectors. It does not require prior knowledge of the specific items and human-computers interaction patterns. The proposed method is applied to both simulated and real process data to demonstrate that the resulting latent variables extract useful information from the response processes.
EURECOM（欧洲通信研究院）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
Autoencoders and their variants are among the most widely used models in representation learning and generative modeling. However, autoencoder-based models usually assume that the learned representations are i.i.d. and fail to capture the correlations between the data samples. To address this issue, we propose a novel Sparse Gaussian Process Bayesian Autoencoder (SGPBAE) model in which we impose fully Bayesian sparse Gaussian Process priors on the latent space of a Bayesian Autoencoder. We perform posterior estimation for this model via stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. We evaluate …
Variational autoencoders learn unsupervised data representations, but these models frequently converge to minima that fail to preserve meaningful semantic information. For example, variational autoencoders with autoregressive decoders often collapse into autodecoders, where they learn to ignore the encoder input. In this work, we demonstrate that adding an auxiliary decoder to regularize the latent space can prevent this collapse, but successful auxiliary decoding tasks are domain dependent. Auxiliary decoders can increase the amount of semantic information encoded in the latent space and visi…
MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）
Generative autoencoders offer a promising approach for controllable text generation by leveraging their latent sentence representations. However, current models struggle to maintain coherent latent spaces required to perform meaningful text manipulations via latent vector operations. Specifically, we demonstrate by example that neural encoders do not necessarily map similar sentences to nearby latent vectors. A theoretical explanation for this phenomenon establishes that high capacity autoencoders can learn an arbitrary mapping between sequences and associated latent representations. To remedy…
In this paper, we treat the image generation task using an autoencoder, a representative latent model. Unlike many studies regularizing the latent variable's distribution by assuming a manually specified prior, we approach the image generation task using an autoencoder by directly estimating the latent distribution. To this end, we introduce 'latent density estimator' which captures latent distribution explicitly and propose its structure. Through experiments, we show that our generative model generates images with the improved visual quality compared to previous autoencoder-based generative m…
School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya（赫兹利亚跨学科中心）
Autoencoders represent an effective approach for computing the underlying factors characterizing datasets of different types. The latent representation of autoencoders have been studied in the context of enabling interpolation between data points by decoding convex combinations of latent vectors. This interpolation, however, often leads to artifacts or produces unrealistic results during reconstruction. We argue that these incongruities are due to the structure of the latent space and because such naively interpolated latent vectors deviate from the data manifold. In this paper, we propose a r…
Noting the importance of the latent variables in inference and learning, we propose a novel framework for autoencoders based on the homeomorphic transformation of latent variables, which could reduce the distance between vectors in the transformed space, while preserving the topological properties of the original space, and investigate the effect of the latent space transformation on learning generative models and denoising corrupted data. The experimental results demonstrate that our generative and denoising models based on the proposed framework can provide better performance than convention…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Learning in the latent variable model is challenging in the presence of the complex data structure or the intractable latent variable. Previous variational autoencoders can be low effective due to the straightforward encoder-decoder structure. In this paper, we propose a variational composite autoencoder to sidestep this issue by amortizing on top of the hierarchical latent variable model. The experimental results confirm the advantages of our model.
The manifold hypothesis states that high-dimensional data can be modeled as lying on or near a low-dimensional, nonlinear manifold. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) approximate this manifold by learning mappings from low-dimensional latent vectors to high-dimensional data while encouraging a global structure in the latent space through the use of a specified prior distribution. When this prior does not match the structure of the true data manifold, it can lead to a less accurate model of the data. To resolve this mismatch, we introduce the Variational Autoencoder with Learned Latent Structure (…
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；Research Institutes of Sweden（瑞典研究机构）
Autoencoders and their variations provide unsupervised models for learning low-dimensional representations for downstream tasks. Without proper regularization, autoencoder models are susceptible to the overfitting problem and the so-called posterior collapse phenomenon. In this paper, we introduce a quantization-based regularizer in the bottleneck stage of autoencoder models to learn meaningful latent representations. We combine both perspectives of Vector Quantized-Variational AutoEncoders (VQ-VAE) and classical denoising regularization methods of neural networks. We interpret quantizers as r…
Probabilistic models with hierarchical-latent-variable structures provide state-of-the-art results amongst non-autoregressive, unsupervised density-based models. However, the most common approach to training such models based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) often fails to leverage deep-latent hierarchies; successful approaches require complex inference and optimisation schemes. Optimal Transport is an alternative, non-likelihood-based framework for training generative models with appealing theoretical properties, in principle allowing easier training convergence between distributions. In th…
FUJITSU LABORATORIES LTD.（富士通实验室有限公司）；Fujitsu R&D Center Co., Ltd.（富士通研发中心有限公司）
To analyze high-dimensional and complex data in the real world, deep generative models, such as variational autoencoder (VAE) embed data in a low-dimensional space (latent space) and learn a probabilistic model in the latent space. However, they struggle to accurately reproduce the probability distribution function (PDF) in the input space from that in the latent space. If the embedding were isometric, this issue can be solved, because the relation of PDFs can become tractable. To achieve isometric property, we propose Rate- Distortion Optimization guided autoencoder inspired by orthonormal tr…
Tiered latent representations and latent spaces for molecular graphs provide a simple but effective way to explicitly represent and utilize groups (e.g., functional groups), which consist of the atom (node) tier, the group tier and the molecule (graph) tier. They can be learned using the tiered graph autoencoder architecture. In this paper we discuss adapting tiered graph autoencoders for use with PyTorch Geometric, for both the deterministic tiered graph autoencoder model and the probabilistic tiered variational graph autoencoder model. We also discuss molecular structure information sources …
University of Tromsø（特罗姆瑟大学）；Santander Consumer Bank AS（桑坦德消费银行股份公司）；Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）
Learning data representations that reflect the customers' creditworthiness can improve marketing campaigns, customer relationship management, data and process management or the credit risk assessment in retail banks. In this research, we adopt the Variational Autoencoder (VAE), which has the ability to learn latent representations that contain useful information. We show that it is possible to steer the latent representations in the latent space of the VAE using the Weight of Evidence and forming a specific grouping of the data that reflects the customers' creditworthiness. Our proposed method…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), such as Langevin dynamics, is valid for approximating intractable distributions. However, its usage is limited in the context of deep latent variable models owing to costly datapoint-wise sampling iterations and slow convergence. This paper proposes the amortized Langevin dynamics (ALD), wherein datapoint-wise MCMC iterations are entirely replaced with updates of an encoder that maps observations into latent variables. This amortization enables efficient posterior sampling without datapoint-wise iterations. Despite its efficiency, we prove that ALD is valid as …
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture（北京建筑大学）
Being one of the most popular generative framework, variational autoencoders(VAE) are known to suffer from a phenomenon termed posterior collapse, i.e. the latent variational distributions collapse to the prior, especially when a strong decoder network is used. In this work, we analyze the latent representation of collapsed VAEs, and proposed a novel model, neighbor embedding VAE(NE-VAE), which explicitly constraints the encoder to encode inputs close in the input space to be close in the latent space. We observed that for VAE variants that report similar ELBO, KL divergence or even mutual inf…
University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；Criteo（Criteo公司）；Duke University（杜克大学）
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are essential tools in end-to-end representation learning. However, the sequential text generation common pitfall with VAEs is that the model tends to ignore latent variables with a strong auto-regressive decoder. In this paper, we propose a principled approach to alleviate this issue by applying a discretized bottleneck to enforce an implicit latent feature matching in a more compact latent space. We impose a shared discrete latent space where each input is learned to choose a combination of latent atoms as a regularized latent representation. Our model endows …
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata（印度统计研究所（加尔各答））
The introduction of Variational Autoencoders (VAE) has been marked as a breakthrough in the history of representation learning models. Besides having several accolades of its own, VAE has successfully flagged off a series of inventions in the form of its immediate successors. Wasserstein Autoencoder (WAE), being an heir to that realm carries with it all of the goodness and heightened generative promises, matching even the generative adversarial networks (GANs). Needless to say, recent years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence in statistical analyses of the GANs. Similar examinations for Aut…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Prosus AI（Prosus人工智能）；Prosus
A disentangled representation of a data set should be capable of recovering the underlying factors that generated it. One question that arises is whether using Euclidean space for latent variable models can produce a disentangled representation when the underlying generating factors have a certain geometrical structure. Take for example the images of a car seen from different angles. The angle has a periodic structure but a 1-dimensional representation would fail to capture this topology. How can we address this problem? The submissions presented for the first stage of the NeurIPS2019 Disentan…
University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；MILA, Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学MILA）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Modern generative models are usually designed to match target distributions directly in the data space, where the intrinsic dimension of data can be much lower than the ambient dimension. We argue that this discrepancy may contribute to the difficulties in training generative models. We therefore propose to map both the generated and target distributions to a latent space using the encoder of a standard autoencoder, and train the generator (or decoder) to match the target distribution in the latent space. Specifically, we enforce the consistency in both the data space and the latent space with…
Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）；Sony CSL（索尼计算机科学研究所）；École Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）
VAEs (Variational AutoEncoders) have proved to be powerful in the context of density modeling and have been used in a variety of contexts for creative purposes. In many settings, the data we model possesses continuous attributes that we would like to take into account at generation time. We propose in this paper GLSR-VAE, a Geodesic Latent Space Regularization for the Variational AutoEncoder architecture and its generalizations which allows a fine control on the embedding of the data into the latent space. When augmenting the VAE loss with this regularization, changes in the learned latent spa…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）；Center for Applied Scientific Computing（应用科学计算中心）
The autoencoder is an artificial neural network model that learns hidden representations of unlabeled data. With a linear transfer function it is similar to the principal component analysis (PCA). While both methods use weight vectors for linear transformations, the autoencoder does not come with any indication similar to the eigenvalues in PCA that are paired with the eigenvectors. We propose a novel supervised node saliency (SNS) method that ranks the hidden nodes by comparing class distributions of latent representations against a fixed reference distribution. The latent representations of …
Duke University（杜克大学）；Infinia ML Inc.（Infinia ML公司）
A new algorithmic framework is proposed for learning autoencoders of data distributions. We minimize the discrepancy between the model and target distributions, with a \emph{relational regularization} on the learnable latent prior. This regularization penalizes the fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) distance between the latent prior and its corresponding posterior, allowing one to flexibly learn a structured prior distribution associated with the generative model. Moreover, it helps co-training of multiple autoencoders even if they have heterogeneous architectures and incomparable latent spaces. W…
We focus on generative autoencoders, such as variational or adversarial autoencoders, which jointly learn a generative model alongside an inference model. Generative autoencoders are those which are trained to softly enforce a prior on the latent distribution learned by the inference model. We call the distribution to which the inference model maps observed samples, the learned latent distribution, which may not be consistent with the prior. We formulate a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling process, equivalent to iteratively decoding and encoding, which allows us to sample from the learn…
Generative AutoEncoders require a chosen probability distribution in latent space, usually multivariate Gaussian. The original Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) uses randomness in encoder - causing problematic distortion, and overlaps in latent space for distinct inputs. It turned out unnecessary: we can instead use deterministic encoder with additional regularizer to ensure that sample distribution in latent space is close to the required. The original approach (WAE) uses Wasserstein metric, what required comparing with random sample and using an arbitrarily chosen kernel. Later CWAE finally deri…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used deep generative models capable of learning unsupervised latent representations of data. Such representations are often difficult to interpret or control. We consider the problem of unsupervised learning of features correlated to specific labels in a dataset. We propose a VAE-based generative model which we show is capable of extracting features correlated to binary labels in the data and structuring it in a latent subspace which is easy to interpret. Our model, the Conditional Subspace VAE (CSVAE), uses mutual information minimization to learn a …
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London（伦敦大学学院盖茨比计算神经科学单元）；Department of Mathematics and Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, University of Maryland College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校数学系与科学计算与数学建模中心）
While variational autoencoders have been successful in several tasks, the use of conventional priors are limited in their ability to encode the underlying structure of input data. We introduce an Encoded Prior Sliced Wasserstein AutoEncoder wherein an additional prior-encoder network learns an embedding of the data manifold which preserves topological and geometric properties of the data, thus improving the structure of latent space. The autoencoder and prior-encoder networks are iteratively trained using the Sliced Wasserstein distance. The effectiveness of the learned manifold encoding is ex…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Variational autoencoders model high-dimensional data by positing low-dimensional latent variables that are mapped through a flexible distribution parametrized by a neural network. Unfortunately, variational autoencoders often suffer from posterior collapse: the posterior of the latent variables is equal to its prior, rendering the variational autoencoder useless as a means to produce meaningful representations. Existing approaches to posterior collapse often attribute it to the use of neural networks or optimization issues due to variational approximation. In this paper, we consider posterior …
Regularized autoencoders learn the latent codes, a structure with the regularization under the distribution, which enables them the capability to infer the latent codes given observations and generate new samples given the codes. However, they are sometimes ambiguous as they tend to produce reconstructions that are not necessarily faithful reproduction of the inputs. The main reason is to enforce the learned latent code distribution to match a prior distribution while the true distribution remains unknown. To improve the reconstruction quality and learn the latent space a manifold structure, t…
AstraZeneca R&D Gothenburg（阿斯利康研发哥德堡）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）
A major challenge in computational chemistry is the generation of novel molecular structures with desirable pharmacological and physiochemical properties. In this work, we investigate the potential use of autoencoder, a deep learning methodology, for de novo molecular design. Various generative autoencoders were used to map molecule structures into a continuous latent space and vice versa and their performance as structure generator was assessed. Our results show that the latent space preserves chemical similarity principle and thus can be used for the generation of analogue structures. Furthe…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Novelty detection using deep generative models such as autoencoder, generative adversarial networks mostly takes image reconstruction error as novelty score function. However, image data, high dimensional as it is, contains a lot of different features other than class information which makes models hard to detect novelty data. The problem gets harder in multi-modal normality case. To address this challenge, we propose a new way of measuring novelty score in multi-modal normality cases using orthogonalized latent space. Specifically, we employ orthogonal low-rank embedding in the latent space t…
Xiaomi AI Lab（小米人工智能实验室）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) has been widely applied as a fundamental generative model in machine learning. For complex samples like imagery objects or scenes, however, VAE suffers from the dimensional dilemma between reconstruction precision that needs high-dimensional latent codes and probabilistic inference that favors a low-dimensional latent space. By virtue of high-dimensional geometry, we propose a very simple algorithm, called Spherical Auto-Encoder (SAE), completely different from existing VAEs to address the issue. SAE is in essence the vanilla autoencoder with spherical normalizat…
Multi-domain translation seeks to learn a probabilistic coupling between marginal distributions that reflects the correspondence between different domains. We assume that data from different domains are generated from a shared latent representation based on a structural equation model. Under this assumption, we show that the problem of computing a probabilistic coupling between marginals is equivalent to learning multiple uncoupled autoencoders that embed to a given shared latent distribution. In addition, we propose a new framework and algorithm for multi-domain translation based on learning …
Wildcard Pharmaceutical Consulting（万卡医药咨询公司）；Science Data Software LLC（科学数据软件有限责任公司）
Chemical autoencoders are attractive models as they combine chemical space navigation with possibilities for de-novo molecule generation in areas of interest. This enables them to produce focused chemical libraries around a single lead compound for employment early in a drug discovery project. Here it is shown that the choice of chemical representation, such as SMILES strings, has a large influence on the properties of the latent space. It is further explored to what extent translating between different chemical representations influences the latent space similarity to the SMILES strings or ci…
Autoencoders provide a powerful framework for learning compressed representations by encoding all of the information needed to reconstruct a data point in a latent code. In some cases, autoencoders can "interpolate": By decoding the convex combination of the latent codes for two datapoints, the autoencoder can produce an output which semantically mixes characteristics from the datapoints. In this paper, we propose a regularization procedure which encourages interpolated outputs to appear more realistic by fooling a critic network which has been trained to recover the mixing coefficient from in…
This work presents a reformulation of the recently proposed Wasserstein autoencoder framework on a non-Euclidean manifold, the Poincaré ball model of the hyperbolic space. By assuming the latent space to be hyperbolic, we can use its intrinsic hierarchy to impose structure on the learned latent space representations. We demonstrate the model in the visual domain to analyze some of its properties and show competitive results on a graph link prediction task.
Variational autoencoders often assume isotropic Gaussian priors and mean-field posteriors, hence do not exploit structure in scenarios where we may expect similarity or consistency across latent variables. Gaussian process variational autoencoders alleviate this problem through the use of a latent Gaussian process, but lead to a cubic inference time complexity. We propose a more scalable extension of these models by leveraging the independence of the auxiliary features, which is present in many datasets. Our model factorizes the latent kernel across these features in different dimensions, lead…
Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University（斯坦福大学电气工程系）；Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University（斯坦福大学生物医学数据科学系）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Variational autoencoders are powerful algorithms for identifying dominant latent structure in a single dataset. In many applications, however, we are interested in modeling latent structure and variation that are enriched in a target dataset compared to some background---e.g. enriched in patients compared to the general population. Contrastive learning is a principled framework to capture such enriched variation between the target and background, but state-of-the-art contrastive methods are limited to linear models. In this paper, we introduce the contrastive variational autoencoder (cVAE), wh…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Mercateo AG（Mercateo公司）
Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a widely used generative model for learning latent representations. Burda et al. in their seminal paper showed that learning capacity of VAE is limited by over-pruning. It is a phenomenon where a significant number of latent variables fail to capture any information about the input data and the corresponding hidden units become inactive. This adversely affects learning diverse and interpretable latent representations. As variational graph autoencoder (VGAE) extends VAE for graph-structured data, it inherits the over-pruning problem. In this paper, we adopt a mo…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
This paper proposes Dirichlet Variational Autoencoder (DirVAE) using a Dirichlet prior for a continuous latent variable that exhibits the characteristic of the categorical probabilities. To infer the parameters of DirVAE, we utilize the stochastic gradient method by approximating the Gamma distribution, which is a component of the Dirichlet distribution, with the inverse Gamma CDF approximation. Additionally, we reshape the component collapsing issue by investigating two problem sources, which are decoder weight collapsing and latent value collapsing, and we show that DirVAE has no component c…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a powerful class of deep generative latent variable model for unsupervised representation learning on high-dimensional data. To ensure computational tractability, VAEs are often implemented with a univariate standard Gaussian prior and a mean-field Gaussian variational posterior distribution. This results in a vector-valued latent variables that are agnostic to the original data structure which might be highly correlated across and within multiple dimensions. We propose a tensor-variate extension to the VAE framework, the tensor-variate Gaussian process prio…
There is an increasingly apparent need for validating the classifications made by deep learning systems in safety-critical applications like autonomous vehicle systems. A number of recent papers have proposed methods for detecting anomalous image data that appear different from known inlier data samples, including reconstruction-based autoencoders. Autoencoders optimize the compression of input data to a latent space of a dimensionality smaller than the original input and attempt to accurately reconstruct the input using that compressed representation. Since the latent vector is optimized to c…
Negative Binomial Variational Autoencoders for Overdispersed Latent Modeling
Southeast University（东南大学）；China Medical University Shenyang（中国医科大学沈阳）；University of Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院大学）；Alibaba Cloud（阿里云）；Center for Applied Statistics and School of Statistics, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学应用统计中心与统计学院）
This paper introduces a new member of the family of Variational Autoencoders (VAE) that constrains the rate of information transferred by the latent layer. The latent layer is interpreted as a communication channel, the information rate of which is bound by imposing a pre-set signal-to-noise ratio. The new constraint subsumes the mutual information between the input and latent variables, combining naturally with the likelihood objective of the observed data as used in a conventional VAE. The resulting Bounded-Information-Rate Variational Autoencoder (BIR-VAE) provides a meaningful latent repre…
The use of Variational Autoencoders in different Machine Learning tasks has drastically increased in the last years. They have been developed as denoising, clustering and generative tools, highlighting a large potential in a wide range of fields. Their embeddings are able to extract relevant information from highly dimensional inputs, but the converged models can differ significantly and lead to degeneracy on the latent space. We leverage the relation between theoretical physics and machine learning to explain this behaviour, and introduce a new approach to correct for degeneration by using pe…
We address the challenging open problem of learning an effective latent space for symbolic music data in generative music modeling. We focus on leveraging adversarial regularization as a flexible and natural mean to imbue variational autoencoders with context information concerning music genre and style. Through the paper, we show how Gaussian mixtures taking into account music metadata information can be used as an effective prior for the autoencoder latent space, introducing the first Music Adversarial Autoencoder (MusAE). The empirical analysis on a large scale benchmark shows that our mode…
Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) is a task to convert texts into speech. Two of the factors that have been driving TTS are the advancements of probabilistic models and latent representation learning. We propose a TTS method based on latent variable conversion using a diffusion probabilistic model and the variational autoencoder (VAE). In our TTS method, we use a waveform model based on VAE, a diffusion model that predicts the distribution of latent variables in the waveform model from texts, and an alignment model that learns alignments between the text and speech latent sequences. Our method in…
Information Technology University (ITU)-Punjab（旁遮普信息技术大学）；University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
Learning the latent representation of data in unsupervised fashion is a very interesting process that provides relevant features for enhancing the performance of a classifier. For speech emotion recognition tasks, generating effective features is crucial. Currently, handcrafted features are mostly used for speech emotion recognition, however, features learned automatically using deep learning have shown strong success in many problems, especially in image processing. In particular, deep generative models such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have gained enormous success for generating featur…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics（瑞士生物信息学研究所）
We propose a novel approach for preserving topological structures of the input space in latent representations of autoencoders. Using persistent homology, a technique from topological data analysis, we calculate topological signatures of both the input and latent space to derive a topological loss term. Under weak theoretical assumptions, we construct this loss in a differentiable manner, such that the encoding learns to retain multi-scale connectivity information. We show that our approach is theoretically well-founded and that it exhibits favourable latent representations on a synthetic mani…
Unsupervised learning is of growing interest because it unlocks the potential held in vast amounts of unlabelled data to learn useful representations for inference. Autoencoders, a form of generative model, may be trained by learning to reconstruct unlabelled input data from a latent representation space. More robust representations may be produced by an autoencoder if it learns to recover clean input samples from corrupted ones. Representations may be further improved by introducing regularisation during training to shape the distribution of the encoded data in latent space. We suggest denois…
We extend Stochastic Gradient Variational Bayes to perform posterior inference for the weights of Stick-Breaking processes. This development allows us to define a Stick-Breaking Variational Autoencoder (SB-VAE), a Bayesian nonparametric version of the variational autoencoder that has a latent representation with stochastic dimensionality. We experimentally demonstrate that the SB-VAE, and a semi-supervised variant, learn highly discriminative latent representations that often outperform the Gaussian VAE's.
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；IMPRS-IS（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所国际马克斯·普朗克研究学院）
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) were originally motivated (Kingma & Welling, 2014) as probabilistic generative models in which one performs approximate Bayesian inference. The proposal of $β$-VAEs (Higgins et al., 2017) breaks this interpretation and generalizes VAEs to application domains beyond generative modeling (e.g., representation learning, clustering, or lossy data compression) by introducing an objective function that allows practitioners to trade off between the information content ("bit rate") of the latent representation and the distortion of reconstructed data (Alemi et al., 2018)…
