No Arabic abstract
The key idea of the state-of-the-art VAE-based unsupervised representation disentanglement methods is to minimize the total correlation of the latent variable distributions. However, it has been proved that VAE-based unsupervised disentanglement can not be achieved without introducing other inductive bias. In this paper, we address VAE-based unsupervised disentanglement by leveraging the constraints derived from the Group Theory based definition as the non-probabilistic inductive bias. More specifically, inspired by the nth dihedral group (the permutation group for regular polygons), we propose a specific form of the definition and prove its two equivalent conditions: isomorphism and the constancy of permutations. We further provide an implementation of isomorphism based on two Group constraints: the Abel constraint for the exchangeability and Order constraint for the cyclicity. We then convert them into a self-supervised training loss that can be incorporated into VAE-based models to bridge their gaps from the Group Theory based definition. We train 1800 models covering the most prominent VAE-based models on five datasets to verify the effectiveness of our method. Compared to the original models, the Groupidied VAEs consistently achieve better mean performance with smaller variances, and make meaningful dimensions controllable.
We view disentanglement learning as discovering an underlying structure that equivariantly reflects the factorized variations shown in data. Traditionally, such a structure is fixed to be a vector space with data variations represented by translations along individual latent dimensions. We argue this simple structure is suboptimal since it requires the model to learn to discard the properties (e.g. different scales of changes, different levels of abstractness) of data variations, which is an extra work than equivariance learning. Instead, we propose to encode the data variations with groups, a structure not only can equivariantly represent variations, but can also be adaptively optimized to preserve the properties of data variations. Considering it is hard to conduct training on group structures, we focus on Lie groups and adopt a parameterization using Lie algebra. Based on the parameterization, some disentanglement learning constraints are naturally derived. A simple model named Commutative Lie Group VAE is introduced to realize the group-based disentanglement learning. Experiments show that our model can effectively learn disentangled representations without supervision, and can achieve state-of-the-art performance without extra constraints.
Many techniques have been proposed for image reconstruction in medical imaging that aim to recover high-quality images especially from limited or corrupted measurements. Model-based reconstruction methods have been particularly popular (e.g., in magnetic resonance imaging and tomographic modalities) and exploit models of the imaging systems physics together with statistical models of measurements, noise and often relatively simple object priors or regularizers. For example, sparsity or low-rankness based regularizers have been widely used for image reconstruction from limited data such as in compressed sensing. Learning-based approaches for image reconstruction have garnered much attention in recent years and have shown promise across biomedical imaging applications. These methods include synthesis dictionary learning, sparsifying transform learning, and different forms of deep learning involving complex neural networks. We briefly discuss classical model-based reconstruction methods and then review reconstruction methods at the intersection of model-based and learning-based paradigms in detail. This review includes many recent methods based on unsupervised learning, and supervised learning, as well as a framework to combine multiple types of learned models together.
Accuracy and consistency are two key factors in computer-assisted magnetic resonance (MR) image analysis. However, contrast variation from site to site caused by lack of standardization in MR acquisition impedes consistent measurements. In recent years, image harmonization approaches have been proposed to compensate for contrast variation in MR images. Current harmonization approaches either require cross-site traveling subjects for supervised training or heavily rely on site-specific harmonization models to encourage harmonization accuracy. These requirements potentially limit the application of current harmonization methods in large-scale multi-site studies. In this work, we propose an unsupervised MR harmonization framework, CALAMITI (Contrast Anatomy Learning and Analysis for MR Intensity Translation and Integration), based on information bottleneck theory. CALAMITI learns a disentangled latent space using a unified structure for multi-site harmonization without the need for traveling subjects. Our model is also able to adapt itself to harmonize MR images from a new site with fine tuning solely on images from the new site. Both qualitative and quantitative results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with other unsupervised harmonization approaches.
Learning useful representations with little or no supervision is a key challenge in artificial intelligence. We provide an in-depth review of recent advances in representation learning with a focus on autoencoder-based models. To organize these results we make use of meta-priors believed useful for downstream tasks, such as disentanglement and hierarchical organization of features. In particular, we uncover three main mechanisms to enforce such properties, namely (i) regularizing the (approximate or aggregate) posterior distribution, (ii) factorizing the encoding and decoding distribution, or (iii) introducing a structured prior distribution. While there are some promising results, implicit or explicit supervision remains a key enabler and all current methods use strong inductive biases and modeling assumptions. Finally, we provide an analysis of autoencoder-based representation learning through the lens of rate-distortion theory and identify a clear tradeoff between the amount of prior knowledge available about the downstream tasks, and how useful the representation is for this task.
Concept-based explanations have emerged as a popular way of extracting human-interpretable representations from deep discriminative models. At the same time, the disentanglement learning literature has focused on extracting similar representations in an unsupervised or weakly-supervised way, using deep generative models. Despite the overlapping goals and potential synergies, to our knowledge, there has not yet been a systematic comparison of the limitations and trade-offs between concept-based explanations and disentanglement approaches. In this paper, we give an overview of these fields, comparing and contrasting their properties and behaviours on a diverse set of tasks, and highlighting their potential strengths and limitations. In particular, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art approaches from both classes can be data inefficient, sensitive to the specific nature of the classification/regression task, or sensitive to the employed concept representation.