No Arabic abstract
Learning from heterogeneous data poses challenges such as combining data from various sources and of different types. Meanwhile, heterogeneous data are often associated with missingness in real-world applications due to heterogeneity and noise of input sources. In this work, we propose the variational selective autoencoder (VSAE), a general framework to learn representations from partially-observed heterogeneous data. VSAE learns the latent dependencies in heterogeneous data by modeling the joint distribution of observed data, unobserved data, and the imputation mask which represents how the data are missing. It results in a unified model for various downstream tasks including data generation and imputation. Evaluation on both low-dimensional and high-dimensional heterogeneous datasets for these two tasks shows improvement over state-of-the-art models.
We would like to learn a representation of the data which decomposes an observation into factors of variation which we can independently control. Specifically, we want to use minimal supervision to learn a latent representation that reflects the semantics behind a specific grouping of the data, where within a group the samples share a common factor of variation. For example, consider a collection of face images grouped by identity. We wish to anchor the semantics of the grouping into a relevant and disentangled representation that we can easily exploit. However, existing deep probabilistic models often assume that the observations are independent and identically distributed. We present the Multi-Level Variational Autoencoder (ML-VAE), a new deep probabilistic model for learning a disentangled representation of a set of grouped observations. The ML-VAE separates the latent representation into semantically meaningful parts by working both at the group level and the observation level, while retaining efficient test-time inference. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that the ML-VAE model (i) learns a semantically meaningful disentanglement of grouped data, (ii) enables manipulation of the latent representation, and (iii) generalises to unseen groups.
This paper proposes Dirichlet Variational Autoencoder (DirVAE) using a Dirichlet prior for a continuous latent variable that exhibits the characteristic of the categorical probabilities. To infer the parameters of DirVAE, we utilize the stochastic gradient method by approximating the Gamma distribution, which is a component of the Dirichlet distribution, with the inverse Gamma CDF approximation. Additionally, we reshape the component collapsing issue by investigating two problem sources, which are decoder weight collapsing and latent value collapsing, and we show that DirVAE has no component collapsing; while Gaussian VAE exhibits the decoder weight collapsing and Stick-Breaking VAE shows the latent value collapsing. The experimental results show that 1) DirVAE models the latent representation result with the best log-likelihood compared to the baselines; and 2) DirVAE produces more interpretable latent values with no collapsing issues which the baseline models suffer from. Also, we show that the learned latent representation from the DirVAE achieves the best classification accuracy in the semi-supervised and the supervised classification tasks on MNIST, OMNIGLOT, and SVHN compared to the baseline VAEs. Finally, we demonstrated that the DirVAE augmented topic models show better performances in most cases.
Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a widely used generative model for learning latent representations. Burda et al. in their seminal paper showed that learning capacity of VAE is limited by over-pruning. It is a phenomenon where a significant number of latent variables fail to capture any information about the input data and the corresponding hidden units become inactive. This adversely affects learning diverse and interpretable latent representations. As variational graph autoencoder (VGAE) extends VAE for graph-structured data, it inherits the over-pruning problem. In this paper, we adopt a model based approach and propose epitomic VGAE (EVGAE),a generative variational framework for graph datasets which successfully mitigates the over-pruning problem and also boosts the generative ability of VGAE. We consider EVGAE to consist of multiple sparse VGAE models, called epitomes, that are groups of latent variables sharing the latent space. This approach aids in increasing active units as epitomes compete to learn better representation of the graph data. We verify our claims via experiments on three benchmark datasets. Our experiments show that EVGAE has a better generative ability than VGAE. Moreover, EVGAE outperforms VGAE on link prediction task in citation networks.
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.
Variation Autoencoder (VAE) has become a powerful tool in modeling the non-linear generative process of data from a low-dimensional latent space. Recently, several studies have proposed to use VAE for unsupervised clustering by using mixture models to capture the multi-modal structure of latent representations. This strategy, however, is ineffective when there are outlier data samples whose latent representations are meaningless, yet contaminating the estimation of key major clusters in the latent space. This exact problem arises in the context of resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) analysis, where clustering major functional connectivity patterns is often hindered by heavy noise of rs-fMRI and many minor clusters (rare connectivity patterns) of no interest to analysis. In this paper we propose a novel generative process, in which we use a Gaussian-mixture to model a few major clusters in the data, and use a non-informative uniform distribution to capture the remaining data. We embed this truncated Gaussian-Mixture model in a Variational AutoEncoder framework to obtain a general joint clustering and outlier detection approach, called tGM-VAE. We demonstrated the applicability of tGM-VAE on the MNIST dataset and further validated it in the context of rs-fMRI connectivity analysis.