Disentangled Variational Auto-Encoder for Semi-supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning is attracting increasing attention due to the fact that datasets of many domains lack enough labeled data. Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE), in particular, has demonstrated the benefits of semi-supervised learning. The majority of existing semi-supervised VAEs utilize a classifier to exploit label information, where the parameters of the classifier are introduced to the VAE. Given the limited labeled data, learning the parameters for the classifiers may not be an optimal solution for exploiting label information. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a novel approach for semi-supervised VAE without classifier. Specifically, we propose a new model called Semi-supervised Disentangled VAE (SDVAE), which encodes the input data into disentangled representation and non-interpretable representation, then the category information is directly utilized to regularize the disentangled representation via the equality constraint. To further enhance the feature learning ability of the proposed VAE, we incorporate reinforcement learning to relieve the lack of data. The dynamic framework is capable of dealing with both image and text data with its corresponding encoder and decoder networks. Extensive experiments on image and text datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.Comment: 6 figures, 10 pages, Information Sciences 201

Semi-supervised Deep Generative Modelling of Incomplete Multi-Modality Emotional Data

There are threefold challenges in emotion recognition. First, it is difficult to recognize human's emotional states only considering a single modality. Second, it is expensive to manually annotate the emotional data. Third, emotional data often suffers from missing modalities due to unforeseeable sensor malfunction or configuration issues. In this paper, we address all these problems under a novel multi-view deep generative framework. Specifically, we propose to model the statistical relationships of multi-modality emotional data using multiple modality-specific generative networks with a shared latent space. By imposing a Gaussian mixture assumption on the posterior approximation of the shared latent variables, our framework can learn the joint deep representation from multiple modalities and evaluate the importance of each modality simultaneously. To solve the labeled-data-scarcity problem, we extend our multi-view model to semi-supervised learning scenario by casting the semi-supervised classification problem as a specialized missing data imputation task. To address the missing-modality problem, we further extend our semi-supervised multi-view model to deal with incomplete data, where a missing view is treated as a latent variable and integrated out during inference. This way, the proposed overall framework can utilize all available (both labeled and unlabeled, as well as both complete and incomplete) data to improve its generalization ability. The experiments conducted on two real multi-modal emotion datasets demonstrated the superiority of our framework.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1704.07548, 2018 ACM Multimedia Conference (MM'18