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Learning Disentangled Representations with the Wasserstein Autoencoder

Gaujac, B; Feige, I; Barber, D; (2021) Learning Disentangled Representations with the Wasserstein Autoencoder. In: Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Research Track. (pp. pp. 69-84). Springer: Switzerland, Cham. Green open access

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Abstract

Disentangled representation learning has undoubtedly benefited from objective function surgery. However, a delicate balancing act of tuning is still required in order to trade off reconstruction fidelity versus disentanglement. Building on previous successes of penalizing the total correlation in the latent variables, we propose TCWAE (Total Correlation Wasserstein Autoencoder). Working in the WAE paradigm naturally enables the separation of the total-correlation term, thus providing disentanglement control over the learned representation, while offering more flexibility in the choice of reconstruction cost. We propose two variants using different KL estimators and analyse in turn the impact of having different ground cost functions and latent regularization terms. Extensive quantitative comparisons on data sets with known generative factors shows that our methods present competitive results relative to state-of-the-art techniques. We further study the trade off between disentanglement and reconstruction on more-difficult data sets with unknown generative factors, where the flexibility of the WAE paradigm leads to improved reconstructions.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Learning Disentangled Representations with the Wasserstein Autoencoder
Event: Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2021)
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-86523-8_5
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86523-8_5
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Wasserstein Autoencoder, Variational Autoencoder, Generative modelling, Representation learning, Disentanglement learning
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138171
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