Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) provide a flexible and scalable framework for non-linear dimensionality reduction. However, in application domains such as genomics where data sets are typically tabular and high-dimensional, a black-box approach to dimensionality reduction does not provide sufficient insights. Common data analysis workflows additionally use clustering techniques to identify groups of similar features. This usually leads to a two-stage process, however, it would be desirable to construct a joint modelling framework for simultaneous dimensionality reduction and clustering of features. In this paper, we propose to achieve this through the BasisVAE: a combination of the VAE and a probabilistic clustering prior, which lets us learn a one-hot basis function representation as part of the decoder network. Furthermore, for scenarios where not all features are aligned, we develop an extension to handle translation-invariant basis functions. We show how a collapsed variational inference scheme leads to scalable and efficient inference for BasisVAE, demonstrated on various toy examples as well as on single-cell gene expression data.
This is a tutorial and survey paper on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), adversarial autoencoders, and their variants. We start with explaining adversarial learning and the vanilla GAN. Then, we explain the conditional GAN and DCGAN. The mode collapse problem is introduced and various methods, including minibatch GAN, unrolled GAN, BourGAN, mixture GAN, D2GAN, and Wasserstein GAN, are introduced for resolving this problem. Then, maximum likelihood estimation in GAN are explained along with f-GAN, adversarial variational Bayes, and Bayesian GAN. Then, we cover feature matching in GAN, InfoG…
Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（向量人工智能研究院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
In this paper, we describe the "implicit autoencoder" (IAE), a generative autoencoder in which both the generative path and the recognition path are parametrized by implicit distributions. We use two generative adversarial networks to define the reconstruction and the regularization cost functions of the implicit autoencoder, and derive the learning rules based on maximum-likelihood learning. Using implicit distributions allows us to learn more expressive posterior and conditional likelihood distributions for the autoencoder. Learning an expressive conditional likelihood distribution enables t…
Image-to-image translation aims to preserve source contents while translating to discriminative target styles between two visual domains. Most works apply adversarial learning in the ambient image space, which could be computationally expensive and challenging to train. In this paper, we propose to deploy an energy-based model (EBM) in the latent space of a pretrained autoencoder for this task. The pretrained autoencoder serves as both a latent code extractor and an image reconstruction worker. Our model, LETIT, is based on the assumption that two domains share the same latent space, where lat…
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 …
Word alignments identify translational correspondences between words in a parallel sentence pair and are used, for instance, to learn bilingual dictionaries, to train statistical machine translation systems or to perform quality estimation. Variational autoencoders have been recently used in various of natural language processing to learn in an unsupervised way latent representations that are useful for language generation tasks. In this paper, we study these models for the task of word alignment and propose and assess several evolutions of a vanilla variational autoencoders. We demonstrate th…
The inverse mapping of GANs'(Generative Adversarial Nets) generator has a great potential value.Hence, some works have been developed to construct the inverse function of generator by directly learning or adversarial learning.While the results are encouraging, the problem is highly challenging and the existing ways of training inverse models of GANs have many disadvantages, such as hard to train or poor performance.Due to these reasons, we propose a new approach based on using inverse generator ($IG$) model as encoder and pre-trained generator ($G$) as decoder of an AutoEncoder network to trai…
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 …
There exist many forms of deep latent variable models, such as the variational autoencoder and adversarial autoencoder. Regardless of the specific class of model, there exists an implicit consensus that the latent distribution should be regularized towards the prior, even in the case where the prior distribution is learned. Upon investigating the effect of latent regularization on image generation our results indicate that in the case where a sufficiently expressive prior is learned, latent regularization is not necessary and may in fact be harmful insofar as image quality is concerned. We add…
In the last few years there have been important advancements in generative models with the two dominant approaches being Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). However, standard Autoencoders (AEs) and closely related structures have remained popular because they are easy to train and adapt to different tasks. An interesting question is if we can achieve state-of-the-art performance with AEs while retaining their good properties. We propose an answer to this question by introducing a new model called Y-Autoencoder (Y-AE). The structure and training procedure…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Ant Financial（蚂蚁金服）
Deep generative models have been enjoying success in modeling continuous data. However it remains challenging to capture the representations for discrete structures with formal grammars and semantics, e.g., computer programs and molecular structures. How to generate both syntactically and semantically correct data still remains largely an open problem. Inspired by the theory of compiler where the syntax and semantics check is done via syntax-directed translation (SDT), we propose a novel syntax-directed variational autoencoder (SD-VAE) by introducing stochastic lazy attributes. This approach c…
Recent advances in imaging from celestial objects in astronomy visualized via optical and radio telescopes to atoms and molecules resolved via electron and probe microscopes are generating immense volumes of imaging data, containing information about the structure of the universe from atomic to astronomic levels. The classical deep convolutional neural network architectures traditionally perform poorly on the data sets having a significant orientational disorder, that is, having multiple copies of the same or similar object in arbitrary orientation in the image plane. Similarly, while clusteri…
Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Twitter
We present an autoencoder that leverages learned representations to better measure similarities in data space. By combining a variational autoencoder with a generative adversarial network we can use learned feature representations in the GAN discriminator as basis for the VAE reconstruction objective. Thereby, we replace element-wise errors with feature-wise errors to better capture the data distribution while offering invariance towards e.g. translation. We apply our method to images of faces and show that it outperforms VAEs with element-wise similarity measures in terms of visual fidelity. …
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；New York Structural Biology Center（纽约结构生物学中心）
Given an image dataset, we are often interested in finding data generative factors that encode semantic content independently from pose variables such as rotation and translation. However, current disentanglement approaches do not impose any specific structure on the learned latent representations. We propose a method for explicitly disentangling image rotation and translation from other unstructured latent factors in a variational autoencoder (VAE) framework. By formulating the generative model as a function of the spatial coordinate, we make the reconstruction error differentiable with respe…
End-to-end optimization has achieved state-of-the-art performance on many specific problems, but there is no straight-forward way to combine pretrained models for new problems. Here, we explore improving modularity by learning a post-hoc interface between two existing models to solve a new task. Specifically, we take inspiration from neural machine translation, and cast the challenging problem of cross-modal domain transfer as unsupervised translation between the latent spaces of pretrained deep generative models. By abstracting away the data representation, we demonstrate that it is possible …
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…
Generating the periodic structure of stable materials is a long-standing challenge for the material design community. This task is difficult because stable materials only exist in a low-dimensional subspace of all possible periodic arrangements of atoms: 1) the coordinates must lie in the local energy minimum defined by quantum mechanics, and 2) global stability also requires the structure to follow the complex, yet specific bonding preferences between different atom types. Existing methods fail to incorporate these factors and often lack proper invariances. We propose a Crystal Diffusion Vari…
Latent space based GAN methods and attention based sequence to sequence models have achieved impressive results in text generation and unsupervised machine translation respectively. Leveraging the two domains, we propose an adversarial latent space based model capable of generating parallel sentences in two languages concurrently and translating bidirectionally. The bilingual generation goal is achieved by sampling from the latent space that is shared between both languages. First two denoising autoencoders are trained, with shared encoders and back-translation to enforce a shared latent state…
The recently introduced introspective variational autoencoder (IntroVAE) exhibits outstanding image generations, and allows for amortized inference using an image encoder. The main idea in IntroVAE is to train a VAE adversarially, using the VAE encoder to discriminate between generated and real data samples. However, the original IntroVAE loss function relied on a particular hinge-loss formulation that is very hard to stabilize in practice, and its theoretical convergence analysis ignored important terms in the loss. In this work, we take a step towards better understanding of the IntroVAE mod…
UT-Battelle, LLC（UT-巴特勒有限责任公司）；U.S. Department of Energy（美国能源部）
Recent advances in scanning tunneling and transmission electron microscopies (STM and STEM) have allowed routine generation of large volumes of imaging data containing information on the structure and functionality of materials. The experimental data sets contain signatures of long-range phenomena such as physical order parameter fields, polarization and strain gradients in STEM, or standing electronic waves and carrier-mediated exchange interactions in STM, all superimposed onto scanning system distortions and gradual changes of contrast due to drift and/or mis-tilt effects. Correspondingly, …
Recurrent models for sequences have been recently successful at many tasks, especially for language modeling and machine translation. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to extract good representations from these models. For instance, even though language has a clear hierarchical structure going from characters through words to sentences, it is not apparent in current language models. We propose to improve the representation in sequence models by augmenting current approaches with an autoencoder that is forced to compress the sequence through an intermediate discrete latent space. In order to…
In this paper, we investigate how to learn a suitable representation of satellite image time series in an unsupervised manner by leveraging large amounts of unlabeled data. Additionally , we aim to disentangle the representation of time series into two representations: a shared representation that captures the common information between the images of a time series and an exclusive representation that contains the specific information of each image of the time series. To address these issues, we propose a model that combines a novel component called cross-domain autoencoders with the variationa…
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science（电子工程与计算机科学学院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；School of Mathematical Sciences（数学科学学院）
This research project investigates the application of deep learning to timbre transfer, where the timbre of a source audio can be converted to the timbre of a target audio with minimal loss in quality. The adopted approach combines Variational Autoencoders with Generative Adversarial Networks to construct meaningful representations of the source audio and produce realistic generations of the target audio and is applied to the Flickr 8k Audio dataset for transferring the vocal timbre between speakers and the URMP dataset for transferring the musical timbre between instruments. Furthermore, vari…
The Synesthetic Variational Autoencoder (SynVAE) introduced in this research is able to learn a consistent mapping between visual and auditive sensory modalities in the absence of paired datasets. A quantitative evaluation on MNIST as well as the Behance Artistic Media dataset (BAM) shows that SynVAE is capable of retaining sufficient information content during the translation while maintaining cross-modal latent space consistency. In a qualitative evaluation trial, human evaluators were furthermore able to match musical samples with the images which generated them with accuracies of up to 73%…
Multiple modalities often co-occur when describing natural phenomena. Learning a joint representation of these modalities should yield deeper and more useful representations. Previous generative approaches to multi-modal input either do not learn a joint distribution or require additional computation to handle missing data. Here, we introduce a multimodal variational autoencoder (MVAE) that uses a product-of-experts inference network and a sub-sampled training paradigm to solve the multi-modal inference problem. Notably, our model shares parameters to efficiently learn under any combination of…
Most deep latent factor models choose simple priors for simplicity, tractability or not knowing what prior to use. Recent studies show that the choice of the prior may have a profound effect on the expressiveness of the model,especially when its generative network has limited capacity. In this paper, we propose to learn a proper prior from data for adversarial autoencoders(AAEs). We introduce the notion of code generators to transform manually selected simple priors into ones that can better characterize the data distribution. Experimental results show that the proposed model can generate bett…
UT-Battelle, LLC（UT-Battelle有限责任公司）；U.S. Department of Energy（美国能源部）
The proliferation of optical, electron, and scanning probe microscopies gives rise to large volumes of imaging data of objects as diversified as cells, bacteria, pollen, to nanoparticles and atoms and molecules. In most cases, the experimental data streams contain images having arbitrary rotations and translations within the image. At the same time, for many cases, small amounts of labeled data are available in the form of prior published results, image collections, and catalogs, or even theoretical models. Here we develop an approach that allows generalizing from a small subset of labeled dat…
Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）
We introduce LOGAN, a deep neural network aimed at learning general-purpose shape transforms from unpaired domains. The network is trained on two sets of shapes, e.g., tables and chairs, while there is neither a pairing between shapes from the domains as supervision nor any point-wise correspondence between any shapes. Once trained, LOGAN takes a shape from one domain and transforms it into the other. Our network consists of an autoencoder to encode shapes from the two input domains into a common latent space, where the latent codes concatenate multi-scale shape features, resulting in an overc…
Objectives. We generate via advanced Deep Learning (DL) techniques artificial leaf images in an automatized way. We aim to dispose of a source of training samples for AI applications for modern crop management. Such applications require large amounts of data and, while leaf images are not truly scarce, image collection and annotation remains a very time--consuming process. Data scarcity can be addressed by augmentation techniques consisting in simple transformations of samples belonging to a small dataset, but the richness of the augmented data is limited: this motivates the search for alterna…
Recent work on learning multilingual word representations usually relies on the use of word-level alignements (e.g. infered with the help of GIZA++) between translated sentences, in order to align the word embeddings in different languages. In this workshop paper, we investigate an autoencoder model for learning multilingual word representations that does without such word-level alignements. The autoencoder is trained to reconstruct the bag-of-word representation of given sentence from an encoded representation extracted from its translation. We evaluate our approach on a multilingual document…
Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）；Elsevier B.V.（爱思唯尔出版集团）；STM Document Engineering Pvt Ltd.（STM文档工程私人有限公司）
Approximating wind flows using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods can be time-consuming. Creating a tool for interactively designing prototypes while observing the wind flow change requires simpler models to simulate faster. Instead of running numerical approximations resulting in detailed calculations, data-driven methods and deep learning might be able to give similar results in a fraction of the time. This work rephrases the problem from computing 3D flow fields using CFD to a 2D image-to-image translation-based problem on the building footprints to predict the flow field at pedestr…
Recently multi-domain recommender systems have received much attention from researchers because they can solve cold-start problem as well as support for cross-selling. However, when applying into multi-domain items, although algorithms specifically addressing a single domain have many difficulties in capturing the specific characteristics of each domain, multi-domain algorithms have less opportunity to obtain similar features among domains. Because both similarities and differences exist among domains, multi-domain models must capture both to achieve good performance. Other studies of multi-do…
An Elastic Shape Variational Autoencoder for Skeleton Pose Trajectories
Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学系统与信息工程系）；Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学生物医学工程系）；Dept. of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学应用数学与统计学系）
