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Register a new userCapturing Label Characteristics in VAEs
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We present a principled approach to incorporating labels in VAEs that captures the rich characteristic information associated with those labels. While prior work has typically conflated these by learning latent variables that directly correspond to label values, we argue this is contrary to the intended effect of supervision in VAEs-capturing rich label characteristics with the latents. For example, we may want to capture the characteristics of a face that make it look young, rather than just the age of the person. To this end, we develop the CCVAE, a novel VAE model and concomitant variational objective which captures label characteristics explicitly in the latent space, eschewing direct correspondences between label values and latents. Through judicious structuring of mappings between such characteristic latents and labels, we show that the CCVAE can effectively learn meaningful representations of the characteristics of interest across a variety of supervision schemes. In particular, we show that the CCVAE allows for more effective and more general interventions to be performed, such as smooth traversals within the characteristics for a given label, diverse conditional generation, and transferring characteristics across datapoints.
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Variational autoencoders optimize an objective that combines a reconstruction loss (the distortion) and a KL term (the rate). The rate is an upper bound on the mutual information, which is often interpreted as a regularizer that controls the degree of compression. We here examine whether inclusion of the rate also acts as an inductive bias that improves generalization. We perform rate-distortion analyses that control the strength of the rate term, the network capacity, and the difficulty of the generalization problem. Decreasing the strength of the rate paradoxically improves generalization in most settings, and reducing the mutual information typically leads to underfitting. Moreover, we show that generalization continues to improve even after the mutual information saturates, indicating that the gap on the bound (i.e. the KL divergence relative to the inference marginal) affects generalization. This suggests that the standard Gaussian prior is not an inductive bias that typically aids generalization, prompting work to understand what choices of priors improve generalization in VAEs.
An implicit goal in works on deep generative models is that such models should be able to generate novel examples that were not previously seen in the training data. In this paper, we investigate to what extent this property holds for widely employed variational autoencoder (VAE) architectures. VAEs maximize a lower bound on the log marginal likelihood, which implies that they will in principle overfit the training data when provided with a sufficiently expressive decoder. In the limit of an infinite capacity decoder, the optimal generative model is a uniform mixture over the training data. More generally, an optimal decoder should output a weighted average over the examples in the training data, where the magnitude of the weights is determined by the proximity in the latent space. This leads to the hypothesis that, for a sufficiently high capacity encoder and decoder, the VAE decoder will perform nearest-neighbor matching according to the coordinates in the latent space. To test this hypothesis, we investigate generalization on the MNIST dataset. We consider both generalization to new examples of previously seen classes, and generalization to the classes that were withheld from the training set. In both cases, we find that reconstructions are closely approximated by nearest neighbors for higher-dimensional parameterizations. When generalizing to unseen classes however, lower-dimensional parameterizations offer a clear advantage.
Due to the phenomenon of posterior collapse, current latent variable generative models pose a challenging design choice that either weakens the capacity of the decoder or requires augmenting the objective so it does not only maximize the likelihood of the data. In this paper, we propose an alternative that utilizes the most powerful generative models as decoders, whilst optimising the variational lower bound all while ensuring that the latent variables preserve and encode useful information. Our proposed $delta$-VAEs achieve this by constraining the variational family for the posterior to have a minimum distance to the prior. For sequential latent variable models, our approach resembles the classic representation learning approach of slow feature analysis. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach at modeling text on LM1B and modeling images: learning representations, improving sample quality, and achieving state of the art log-likelihood on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet $32times 32$.
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been shown to be able to generate game levels but require manual exploration of the learned latent space to generate outputs with desired attributes. While conditional VAEs address this by allowing generation to be conditioned on labels, such labels have to be provided during training and thus require prior knowledge which may not always be available. In this paper, we apply Gaussian Mixture VAEs (GMVAEs), a variant of the VAE which imposes a mixture of Gaussians (GM) on the latent space, unlike regular VAEs which impose a unimodal Gaussian. This allows GMVAEs to cluster levels in an unsupervised manner using the components of the GM and then generate new levels using the learned components. We demonstrate our approach with levels from Super Mario Bros., Kid Icarus and Mega Man. Our results show that the learned components discover and cluster level structures and patterns and can be used to generate levels with desired characteristics.
Partial multi-label learning (PML) models the scenario where each training instance is annotated with a set of candidate labels, and only some of the labels are relevant. The PML problem is practical in real-world scenarios, as it is difficult and even impossible to obtain precisely labeled samples. Several PML solutions have been proposed to combat with the prone misled by the irrelevant labels concealed in the candidate labels, but they generally focus on the smoothness assumption in feature space or low-rank assumption in label space, while ignore the negative information between features and labels. Specifically, if two instances have largely overlapped candidate labels, irrespective of their feature similarity, their ground-truth labels should be similar; while if they are dissimilar in the feature and candidate label space, their ground-truth labels should be dissimilar with each other. To achieve a credible predictor on PML data, we propose a novel approach called PML-LFC (Partial Multi-label Learning with Label and Feature Collaboration). PML-LFC estimates the confidence values of relevant labels for each instance using the similarity from both the label and feature spaces, and trains the desired predictor with the estimated confidence values. PML-LFC achieves the predictor and the latent label matrix in a reciprocal reinforce manner by a unified model, and develops an alternative optimization procedure to optimize them. Extensive empirical study on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the superiority of PML-LFC.
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