Improving Disentangled Representation Learning with the Beta Bernoulli Process
To improve the ability of VAE to disentangle in the latent space, existing works mostly focus on enforcing independence among the learned latent factors. However, the ability of these models to disentangle often decreases as the complexity of the generative factors increases. In this paper, we investigate the little-explored effect of the modeling capacity of a posterior density on the disentangling ability of the VAE. We note that the independence within and the complexity of the latent density are two different properties we constrain when regularizing the posterior density: while the former promotes the disentangling ability of VAE, the latter -- if overly limited -- creates an unnecessary competition with the data reconstruction objective in VAE. Therefore, if we preserve the independence but allow richer modeling capacity in the posterior density, we will lift this competition and thereby allow improved independence and data reconstruction at the same time. We investigate this theoretical intuition with a VAE that utilizes a non-parametric latent factor model, the Indian Buffet Process (IBP), as a latent density that is able to grow with the complexity of the data. Across three widely-used benchmark data sets and two clinical data sets little explored for disentangled learning, we qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrated the improved disentangling performance of IBP-VAE over the state of the art. In the latter two clinical data sets riddled with complex factors of variations, we further demonstrated that unsupervised disentangling of nuisance factors via IBP-VAE -- when combined with a supervised objective -- can not only improve task accuracy in comparison to relevant supervised deep architectures but also facilitate knowledge discovery related to task decision-making. A shorter version of this work will appear in the ICDM 2019 conference proceedings.
Code (1)
Tasks
Decision MakingRepresentation LearningMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
The continuum-of-urns scheme, generalized beta and Indian buffet processes, and hierarchies thereof
We describe the combinatorial stochastic process underlying a sequence of conditionally independent Bernoulli processes with a shared beta process hazard measure. As shown by Thibaux and Jordan [TJ07], in the special cas…
Bayesian Beta-Bernoulli Process Sparse Coding with Deep Neural Networks
Several approximate inference methods have been proposed for deep discrete latent variable models. However, non-parametric methods which have previously been successfully employed for classical sparse coding models have …
The combinatorial structure of beta negative binomial processes
We characterize the combinatorial structure of conditionally-i.i.d. sequences of negative binomial processes with a common beta process base measure. In Bayesian nonparametric applications, such processes have served as …
A Closer Look at Disentangling in $β$-VAE
In many data analysis tasks, it is beneficial to learn representations where each dimension is statistically independent and thus disentangled from the others. If data generating factors are also statistically independen…
Bayesian InferenceVariational InferenceUnderstanding disentangling in $β$-VAE
We present new intuitions and theoretical assessments of the emergence of disentangled representation in variational autoencoders. Taking a rate-distortion theory perspective, we show the circumstances under which repres…