Jointly trained image and video generation using residual vectors

In this work, we propose a modeling technique for jointly training image and video generation models by simultaneously learning to map latent variables with a fixed prior onto real images and interpolate over images to generate videos. The proposed approach models the variations in representations using residual vectors encoding the change at each time step over a summary vector for the entire video. We utilize the technique to jointly train an image generation model with a fixed prior along with a video generation model lacking constraints such as disentanglement. The joint training enables the image generator to exploit temporal information while the video generation model learns to flexibly share information across frames. Moreover, experimental results verify our approach's compatibility with pre-training on videos or images and training on datasets containing a mixture of both. A comprehensive set of quantitative and qualitative evaluations reveal the improvements in sample quality and diversity over both video generation and image generation baselines. We further demonstrate the technique's capabilities of exploiting similarity in features across frames by applying it to a model based on decomposing the video into motion and content. The proposed model allows minor variations in content across frames while maintaining the temporal dependence through latent vectors encoding the pose or motion features.Comment: Accepted in 2020 Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV '20

A Commentary on the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations

The goal of the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is to separate the independent explanatory factors of variation in the data without access to supervision. In this paper, we summarize the results of Locatello et al., 2019, and focus on their implications for practitioners. We discuss the theoretical result showing that the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is fundamentally impossible without inductive biases and the practical challenges it entails. Finally, we comment on our experimental findings, highlighting the limitations of state-of-the-art approaches and directions for future research

Flow Factorized Representation Learning

A prominent goal of representation learning research is to achieve representations which are factorized in a useful manner with respect to the ground truth factors of variation. The fields of disentangled and equivariant representation learning have approached this ideal from a range of complimentary perspectives; however, to date, most approaches have proven to either be ill-specified or insufficiently flexible to effectively separate all realistic factors of interest in a learned latent space. In this work, we propose an alternative viewpoint on such structured representation learning which we call Flow Factorized Representation Learning, and demonstrate it to learn both more efficient and more usefully structured representations than existing frameworks. Specifically, we introduce a generative model which specifies a distinct set of latent probability paths that define different input transformations. Each latent flow is generated by the gradient field of a learned potential following dynamic optimal transport. Our novel setup brings new understandings to both \textit{disentanglement} and \textit{equivariance}. We show that our model achieves higher likelihoods on standard representation learning benchmarks while simultaneously being closer to approximately equivariant models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the transformations learned by our model are flexibly composable and can also extrapolate to new data, implying a degree of robustness and generalizability approaching the ultimate goal of usefully factorized representation learning.Comment: NeurIPS2

Learning Disentangled Representations with Latent Variation Predictability

Latent traversal is a popular approach to visualize the disentangled latent representations. Given a bunch of variations in a single unit of the latent representation, it is expected that there is a change in a single factor of variation of the data while others are fixed. However, this impressive experimental observation is rarely explicitly encoded in the objective function of learning disentangled representations. This paper defines the variation predictability of latent disentangled representations. Given image pairs generated by latent codes varying in a single dimension, this varied dimension could be closely correlated with these image pairs if the representation is well disentangled. Within an adversarial generation process, we encourage variation predictability by maximizing the mutual information between latent variations and corresponding image pairs. We further develop an evaluation metric that does not rely on the ground-truth generative factors to measure the disentanglement of latent representations. The proposed variation predictability is a general constraint that is applicable to the VAE and GAN frameworks for boosting disentanglement of latent representations. Experiments show that the proposed variation predictability correlates well with existing ground-truth-required metrics and the proposed algorithm is effective for disentanglement learning.Comment: 14 pages, ECCV2

Benchmarking bias mitigation algorithms in representation learning through fairness metrics

Le succès des modèles d’apprentissage en profondeur et leur adoption rapide dans de nombreux domaines d’application ont soulevé d’importantes questions sur l’équité de ces modèles lorsqu’ils sont déployés dans le monde réel. Des études récentes ont mis en évidence les biais encodés par les algorithmes d’apprentissage des représentations et ont remis en cause la fiabilité de telles approches pour prendre des décisions. En conséquence, il existe un intérêt croissant pour la compréhension des sources de biais dans l’apprentissage des algorithmes et le développement de stratégies d’atténuation des biais. L’objectif des algorithmes d’atténuation des biais est d’atténuer l’influence des caractéristiques des données sensibles sur les décisions d’éligibilité prises. Les caractéristiques sensibles sont des caractéristiques privées et protégées d’un ensemble de données telles que le sexe ou la race, qui ne devraient pas affecter les décisions de sortie d’éligibilité, c’està-dire les critères qui rendent un individu qualifié ou non qualifié pour une tâche donnée, comme l’octroi de prêts ou l’embauche. Les modèles d’atténuation des biais visent à prendre des décisions d’éligibilité sur des échantillons d’ensembles de données sans biais envers les attributs sensibles des données d’entrée. La difficulté des tâches d’atténuation des biais est souvent déterminée par la distribution de l’ensemble de données, qui à son tour est fonction du déséquilibre potentiel de l’étiquette et des caractéristiques, de la corrélation des caractéristiques potentiellement sensibles avec d’autres caractéristiques des données, du décalage de la distribution de l’apprentissage vers le phase de développement, etc. Sans l’évaluation des modèles d’atténuation des biais dans diverses configurations difficiles, leurs mérites restent incertains. Par conséquent, une analyse systématique qui comparerait différentes approches d’atténuation des biais sous la perspective de différentes mesures d’équité pour assurer la réplication des résultats conclus est nécessaire. À cette fin, nous proposons un cadre unifié pour comparer les approches d’atténuation des biais. Nous évaluons différentes méthodes d’équité formées avec des réseaux de neurones profonds sur un ensemble de données synthétiques commun et un ensemble de données du monde réel pour obtenir de meilleures informations sur le fonctionnement de ces méthodes. En particulier, nous formons environ 3000 modèles différents dans diverses configurations, y compris des configurations de données déséquilibrées et corrélées, pour vérifier les limites des modèles actuels et mieux comprendre dans quelles configurations ils sont sujets à des défaillances. Nos résultats montrent que le biais des modèles augmente à mesure que les ensembles de données deviennent plus déséquilibrés ou que les attributs des ensembles de données deviennent plus corrélés, le niveau de dominance des caractéristiques des ensembles de données sensibles corrélées a un impact sur le biais, et les informations sensibles restent dans la représentation latente même lorsque des algorithmes d’atténuation des biais sont appliqués. Résumant nos contributions - nous présentons un ensemble de données, proposons diverses configurations d’évaluation difficiles et évaluons rigoureusement les récents algorithmes prometteurs d’atténuation des biais dans un cadre commun et publions publiquement cette référence, en espérant que la communauté des chercheurs le considérerait comme un point d’entrée commun pour un apprentissage en profondeur équitable.The rapid use and success of deep learning models in various application domains have raised significant challenges about the fairness of these models when used in the real world. Recent research has shown the biases incorporated within representation learning algorithms, raising doubts about the dependability of such decision-making systems. As a result, there is a growing interest in identifying the sources of bias in learning algorithms and developing bias-mitigation techniques. The bias-mitigation algorithms aim to reduce the impact of sensitive data aspects on eligibility choices. Sensitive features are private and protected features of a dataset, such as gender of the person or race, that should not influence output eligibility decisions, i.e., the criteria that determine whether or not an individual is qualified for a particular activity, such as lending or hiring. Bias mitigation models are designed to make eligibility choices on dataset samples without bias toward sensitive input data properties. The dataset distribution, which is a function of the potential label and feature imbalance, the correlation of potentially sensitive features with other features in the data, the distribution shift from training to the development phase, and other factors, determines the difficulty of bias-mitigation tasks. Without evaluating bias-mitigation models in various challenging setups, the merits of deep learning approaches to these tasks remain unclear. As a result, a systematic analysis is required to compare different bias-mitigation procedures using various fairness criteria to ensure that the final results are replicated. In order to do so, this thesis offers a single paradigm for comparing bias-mitigation methods. To better understand how these methods work, we compare alternative fairness algorithms trained with deep neural networks on a common synthetic dataset and a real-world dataset. We train around 3000 distinct models in various setups, including imbalanced and correlated data configurations, to validate the present models’ limits and better understand which setups are prone to failure. Our findings show that as datasets become more imbalanced or dataset attributes become more correlated, model bias increases, the dominance of correlated sensitive dataset features influence bias, and sensitive data remains in the latent representation even after bias-mitigation algorithms are applied. In summary, we present a dataset, propose multiple challenging assessment scenarios, rigorously analyse recent promising bias-mitigation techniques in a common framework, and openly disclose this benchmark as an entry point for fair deep learning