Multi-Source Neural Variational Inference

Learning from multiple sources of information is an important problem in machine-learning research. The key challenges are learning representations and formulating inference methods that take into account the complementarity and redundancy of various information sources. In this paper we formulate a variational autoencoder based multi-source learning framework in which each encoder is conditioned on a different information source. This allows us to relate the sources via the shared latent variables by computing divergence measures between individual source's posterior approximations. We explore a variety of options to learn these encoders and to integrate the beliefs they compute into a consistent posterior approximation. We visualise learned beliefs on a toy dataset and evaluate our methods for learning shared representations and structured output prediction, showing trade-offs of learning separate encoders for each information source. Furthermore, we demonstrate how conflict detection and redundancy can increase robustness of inference in a multi-source setting.Comment: AAAI 2019, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 201

Wyner VAE: Joint and Conditional Generation with Succinct Common Representation Learning

A new variational autoencoder (VAE) model is proposed that learns a succinct common representation of two correlated data variables for conditional and joint generation tasks. The proposed Wyner VAE model is based on two information theoretic problems---distributed simulation and channel synthesis---in which Wyner's common information arises as the fundamental limit of the succinctness of the common representation. The Wyner VAE decomposes a pair of correlated data variables into their common representation (e.g., a shared concept) and local representations that capture the remaining randomness (e.g., texture and style) in respective data variables by imposing the mutual information between the data variables and the common representation as a regularization term. The utility of the proposed approach is demonstrated through experiments for joint and conditional generation with and without style control using synthetic data and real images. Experimental results show that learning a succinct common representation achieves better generative performance and that the proposed model outperforms existing VAE variants and the variational information bottleneck method.Comment: 24 pages, 18 figure

SCAN: Learning Hierarchical Compositional Visual Concepts

The seemingly infinite diversity of the natural world arises from a relatively small set of coherent rules, such as the laws of physics or chemistry. We conjecture that these rules give rise to regularities that can be discovered through primarily unsupervised experiences and represented as abstract concepts. If such representations are compositional and hierarchical, they can be recombined into an exponentially large set of new concepts. This paper describes SCAN (Symbol-Concept Association Network), a new framework for learning such abstractions in the visual domain. SCAN learns concepts through fast symbol association, grounding them in disentangled visual primitives that are discovered in an unsupervised manner. Unlike state of the art multimodal generative model baselines, our approach requires very few pairings between symbols and images and makes no assumptions about the form of symbol representations. Once trained, SCAN is capable of multimodal bi-directional inference, generating a diverse set of image samples from symbolic descriptions and vice versa. It also allows for traversal and manipulation of the implicit hierarchy of visual concepts through symbolic instructions and learnt logical recombination operations. Such manipulations enable SCAN to break away from its training data distribution and imagine novel visual concepts through symbolically instructed recombination of previously learnt concepts