No Arabic abstract
Although with progress in introducing auxiliary amortized inference models, learning discrete latent variable models is still challenging. In this paper, we show that the annoying difficulty of obtaining reliable stochastic gradients for the inference model and the drawback of indirectly optimizing the target log-likelihood can be gracefully addressed in a new method based on stochastic approximation (SA) theory of the Robbins-Monro type. Specifically, we propose to directly maximize the target log-likelihood and simultaneously minimize the inclusive divergence between the posterior and the inference model. The resulting learning algorithm is called joint SA (JSA). To the best of our knowledge, JSA represents the first method that couples an SA version of the EM (expectation-maximization) algorithm (SAEM) with an adaptive MCMC procedure. Experiments on several benchmark generative modeling and structured prediction tasks show that JSA consistently outperforms recent competitive algorithms, with faster convergence, better final likelihoods, and lower variance of gradient estimates.
Deep kernel learning (DKL) leverages the connection between Gaussian process (GP) and neural networks (NN) to build an end-to-end, hybrid model. It combines the capability of NN to learn rich representations under massive data and the non-parametric property of GP to achieve automatic regularization that incorporates a trade-off between model fit and model complexity. However, the deterministic encoder may weaken the model regularization of the following GP part, especially on small datasets, due to the free latent representation. We therefore present a complete deep latent-variable kernel learning (DLVKL) model wherein the latent variables perform stochastic encoding for regularized representation. We further enhance the DLVKL from two aspects: (i) the expressive variational posterior through neural stochastic differential equation (NSDE) to improve the approximation quality, and (ii) the hybrid prior taking knowledge from both the SDE prior and the posterior to arrive at a flexible trade-off. Intensive experiments imply that the DLVKL-NSDE performs similarly to the well calibrated GP on small datasets, and outperforms existing deep GPs on large datasets.
We present a model that can automatically learn alignments between high-dimensional data in an unsupervised manner. Our proposed method casts alignment learning in a framework where both alignment and data are modelled simultaneously. Further, we automatically infer groupings of different types of sequences within the same dataset. We derive a probabilistic model built on non-parametric priors that allows for flexible warps while at the same time providing means to specify interpretable constraints. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with superior quantitative performance to the state-of-the-art approaches and provide examples to illustrate the versatility of our model in automatic inference of sequence groupings, absent from previous approaches, as well as easy specification of high level priors for different modalities of data.
Deep latent variable models (DLVMs) combine the approximation abilities of deep neural networks and the statistical foundations of generative models. Variational methods are commonly used for inference; however, the exact likelihood of these models has been largely overlooked. The purpose of this work is to study the general properties of this quantity and to show how they can be leveraged in practice. We focus on important inferential problems that rely on the likelihood: estimation and missing data imputation. First, we investigate maximum likelihood estimation for DLVMs: in particular, we show that most unconstrained models used for continuous data have an unbounded likelihood function. This problematic behaviour is demonstrated to be a source of mode collapse. We also show how to ensure the existence of maximum likelihood estimates, and draw useful connections with nonparametric mixture models. Finally, we describe an algorithm for missing data imputation using the exact conditional likelihood of a deep latent variable model. On several data sets, our algorithm consistently and significantly outperforms the usual imputation scheme used for DLVMs.
In many scientific problems such as video surveillance, modern genomic analysis, and clinical studies, data are often collected from diverse domains across time that exhibit time-dependent heterogeneous properties. It is important to not only integrate data from multiple sources (called multiview data), but also to incorporate time dependency for deep understanding of the underlying system. Latent factor models are popular tools for exploring multi-view data. However, it is frequently observed that these models do not perform well for complex systems and they are not applicable to time-series data. Therefore, we propose a generative model based on variational autoencoder and recurrent neural network to infer the latent dynamic factors for multivariate timeseries data. This approach allows us to identify the disentangled latent embeddings across multiple modalities while accounting for the time factor. We invoke our proposed model for analyzing three datasets on which we demonstrate the effectiveness and the interpretability of the model.
Neural latent variable models enable the discovery of interesting structure in speech audio data. This paper presents a comparison of two different approaches which are broadly based on predicting future time-steps or auto-encoding the input signal. Our study compares the representations learned by vq-vae and vq-wav2vec in terms of sub-word unit discovery and phoneme recognition performance. Results show that future time-step prediction with vq-wav2vec achieves better performance. The best system achieves an error rate of 13.22 on the ZeroSpeech 2019 ABX phoneme discrimination challenge