No Arabic abstract
Deep generative models reproduce complex empirical data but cannot extrapolate to novel environments. An intuitive idea to promote extrapolation capabilities is to enforce the architecture to have the modular structure of a causal graphical model, where one can intervene on each module independently of the others in the graph. We develop a framework to formalize this intuition, using the principle of Independent Causal Mechanisms, and show how over-parameterization of generative neural networks can hinder extrapolation capabilities. Our experiments on the generation of human faces shows successive layers of a generator architecture implement independent mechanisms to some extent, allowing meaningful extrapolations. Finally, we illustrate that independence of mechanisms may be enforced during training to improve extrapolation.
We introduce a new local sparse attention layer that preserves two-dimensional geometry and locality. We show that by just replacing the dense attention layer of SAGAN with our construction, we obtain very significant FID, Inception score and pure visual improvements. FID score is improved from $18.65$ to $15.94$ on ImageNet, keeping all other parameters the same. The sparse attention patterns that we propose for our new layer are designed using a novel information theoretic criterion that uses information flow graphs. We also present a novel way to invert Generative Adversarial Networks with attention. Our method extracts from the attention layer of the discriminator a saliency map, which we use to construct a new loss function for the inversion. This allows us to visualize the newly introduced attention heads and show that they indeed capture interesting aspects of two-dimensional geometry of real images.
A common assumption in causal modeling posits that the data is generated by a set of independent mechanisms, and algorithms should aim to recover this structure. Standard unsupervised learning, however, is often concerned with training a single model to capture the overall distribution or aspects thereof. Inspired by clustering approaches, we consider mixtures of implicit generative models that ``disentangle the independent generative mechanisms underlying the data. Relying on an additional set of discriminators, we propose a competitive training procedure in which the models only need to capture the portion of the data distribution from which they can produce realistic samples. As a by-product, each model is simpler and faster to train. We empirically show that our approach splits the training distribution in a sensible way and increases the quality of the generated samples.
Generative models are typically trained on grid-like data such as images. As a result, the size of these models usually scales directly with the underlying grid resolution. In this paper, we abandon discretized grids and instead parameterize individual data points by continuous functions. We then build generative models by learning distributions over such functions. By treating data points as functions, we can abstract away from the specific type of data we train on and construct models that scale independently of signal resolution. To train our model, we use an adversarial approach with a discriminator that acts on continuous signals. Through experiments on both images and 3D shapes, we demonstrate that our model can learn rich distributions of functions independently of data type and resolution.
Learning modular structures which reflect the dynamics of the environment can lead to better generalization and robustness to changes which only affect a few of the underlying causes. We propose Recurrent Independent Mechanisms (RIMs), a new recurrent architecture in which multiple groups of recurrent cells operate with nearly independent transition dynamics, communicate only sparingly through the bottleneck of attention, and are only updated at time steps where they are most relevant. We show that this leads to specialization amongst the RIMs, which in turn allows for dramatically improved generalization on tasks where some factors of variation differ systematically between training and evaluation.
Compositional structures between parts and objects are inherent in natural scenes. Modeling such compositional hierarchies via unsupervised learning can bring various benefits such as interpretability and transferability, which are important in many downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose the first deep latent variable model, called RICH, for learning Representation of Interpretable Compositional Hierarchies. At the core of RICH is a latent scene graph representation that organizes the entities of a scene into a tree structure according to their compositional relationships. During inference, taking top-down approach, RICH is able to use higher-level representation to guide lower-level decomposition. This avoids the difficult problem of routing between parts and objects that is faced by bottom-up approaches. In experiments on images containing multiple objects with different part compositions, we demonstrate that RICH is able to learn the latent compositional hierarchy and generate imaginary scenes.