No Arabic abstract
Learning useful representations of complex data has been the subject of extensive research for many years. With the diffusion of Deep Neural Networks, Variational Autoencoders have gained lots of attention since they provide an explicit model of the data distribution based on an encoder/decoder architecture which is able to both generate images and encode them in a low-dimensional subspace. However, the latent space is not easily interpretable and the generation capabilities show some limitations since images typically look blurry and lack details. In this paper, we propose the Introspective Variational Classifier (IntroVAC), a model that learns interpretable latent subspaces by exploiting information from an additional label and provides improved image quality thanks to an adversarial training strategy.We show that IntroVAC is able to learn meaningful directions in the latent space enabling fine-grained manipulation of image attributes. We validate our approach on the CelebA dataset.
Deep Neural networks have gained lots of attention in recent years thanks to the breakthroughs obtained in the field of Computer Vision. However, despite their popularity, it has been shown that they provide limited robustness in their predictions. In particular, it is possible to synthesise small adversarial perturbations that imperceptibly modify a correctly classified input data, making the network confidently misclassify it. This has led to a plethora of different methods to try to improve robustness or detect the presence of these perturbations. In this paper, we perform an analysis of $beta$-Variational Classifiers, a particular class of methods that not only solve a specific classification task, but also provide a generative component that is able to generate new samples from the input distribution. More in details, we study their robustness and detection capabilities, together with some novel insights on the generative part of the model.
Gradient-based meta-learning techniques are both widely applicable and proficient at solving challenging few-shot learning and fast adaptation problems. However, they have practical difficulties when operating on high-dimensional parameter spaces in extreme low-data regimes. We show that it is possible to bypass these limitations by learning a data-dependent latent generative representation of model parameters, and performing gradient-based meta-learning in this low-dimensional latent space. The resulting approach, latent embedding optimization (LEO), decouples the gradient-based adaptation procedure from the underlying high-dimensional space of model parameters. Our evaluation shows that LEO can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the competitive miniImageNet and tieredImageNet few-shot classification tasks. Further analysis indicates LEO is able to capture uncertainty in the data, and can perform adaptation more effectively by optimizing in latent space.
While variational autoencoders have been successful generative models for a variety of tasks, the use of conventional Gaussian or Gaussian mixture priors are limited in their ability to capture topological or geometric properties of data in the latent representation. In this work, we introduce an Encoded Prior Sliced Wasserstein AutoEncoder (EPSWAE) wherein an additional prior-encoder network learns an unconstrained prior to match the encoded data manifold. The autoencoder and prior-encoder networks are iteratively trained using the Sliced Wasserstein Distance (SWD), which efficiently measures the distance between two $textit{arbitrary}$ sampleable distributions without being constrained to a specific form as in the KL divergence, and without requiring expensive adversarial training. Additionally, we enhance the conventional SWD by introducing a nonlinear shearing, i.e., averaging over random $textit{nonlinear}$ transformations, to better capture differences between two distributions. The prior is further encouraged to encode the data manifold by use of a structural consistency term that encourages isometry between feature space and latent space. Lastly, interpolation along $textit{geodesics}$ on the latent space representation of the data manifold generates samples that lie on the manifold and hence is advantageous compared with standard Euclidean interpolation. To this end, we introduce a graph-based algorithm for identifying network-geodesics in latent space from samples of the prior that maximize the density of samples along the path while minimizing total energy. We apply our framework to 3D-spiral, MNIST, and CelebA datasets, and show that its latent representations and interpolations are comparable to the state of the art on equivalent architectures.
Learning interpretable representations of data remains a central challenge in deep learning. When training a deep generative model, the observed data are often associated with certain categorical labels, and, in parallel with learning to regenerate data and simulate new data, learning an interpretable representation of each class of data is also a process of acquiring knowledge. Here, we present a novel generative model, referred to as the Supervised Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (S-VQ-VAE), which combines the power of supervised and unsupervised learning to obtain a unique, interpretable global representation for each class of data. Compared with conventional generative models, our model has three key advantages: first, it is an integrative model that can simultaneously learn a feature representation for individual data point and a global representation for each class of data; second, the learning of global representations with embedding codes is guided by supervised information, which clearly defines the interpretation of each code; and third, the global representations capture crucial characteristics of different classes, which reveal similarity and differences of statistical structures underlying different groups of data. We evaluated the utility of S-VQ-VAE on a machine learning benchmark dataset, the MNIST dataset, and on gene expression data from the Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures (LINCS). We proved that S-VQ-VAE was able to learn the global genetic characteristics of samples perturbed by the same class of perturbagen (PCL), and further revealed the mechanism correlations between PCLs. Such knowledge is crucial for promoting new drug development for complex diseases like cancer.
Human perception is structured around objects which form the basis for our higher-level cognition and impressive systematic generalization abilities. Yet most work on representation learning focuses on feature learning without even considering multiple objects, or treats segmentation as an (often supervised) preprocessing step. Instead, we argue for the importance of learning to segment and represent objects jointly. We demonstrate that, starting from the simple assumption that a scene is composed of multiple entities, it is possible to learn to segment images into interpretable objects with disentangled representations. Our method learns -- without supervision -- to inpaint occluded parts, and extrapolates to scenes with more objects and to unseen objects with novel feature combinations. We also show that, due to the use of iterative variational inference, our system is able to learn multi-modal posteriors for ambiguous inputs and extends naturally to sequences.