Challenges in Disentangling Independent Factors of Variation

We study the problem of building models that disentangle independent factors of variation. Such models could be used to encode features that can efficiently be used for classification and to transfer attributes between different images in image synthesis. As data we use a weakly labeled training set. Our weak labels indicate what single factor has changed between two data samples, although the relative value of the change is unknown. This labeling is of particular interest as it may be readily available without annotation costs. To make use of weak labels we introduce an autoencoder model and train it through constraints on image pairs and triplets. We formally prove that without additional knowledge there is no guarantee that two images with the same factor of variation will be mapped to the same feature. We call this issue the reference ambiguity. Moreover, we show the role of the feature dimensionality and adversarial training. We demonstrate experimentally that the proposed model can successfully transfer attributes on several datasets, but show also cases when the reference ambiguity occurs.Comment: Submitted to ICLR 201

Learning Disentangled Representations with Reference-Based Variational Autoencoders

Learning disentangled representations from visual data, where different high-level generative factors are independently encoded, is of importance for many computer vision tasks. Solving this problem, however, typically requires to explicitly label all the factors of interest in training images. To alleviate the annotation cost, we introduce a learning setting which we refer to as "reference-based disentangling". Given a pool of unlabeled images, the goal is to learn a representation where a set of target factors are disentangled from others. The only supervision comes from an auxiliary "reference set" containing images where the factors of interest are constant. In order to address this problem, we propose reference-based variational autoencoders, a novel deep generative model designed to exploit the weak-supervision provided by the reference set. By addressing tasks such as feature learning, conditional image generation or attribute transfer, we validate the ability of the proposed model to learn disentangled representations from this minimal form of supervision