We present a factorized hierarchical variational autoencoder, which learns disentangled and interpretable representations from sequential data without supervision. Specifically, we exploit the multi-scale nature of information in sequential data by formulating it explicitly within a factorized hierarchical graphical model that imposes sequence-dependent priors and sequence-independent priors to different sets of latent variables. The model is evaluated on two speech corpora to demonstrate, qualitatively, its ability to transform speakers or linguistic content by manipulating different sets of latent variables; and quantitatively, its ability to outperform an i-vector baseline for speaker verification and reduce the word error rate by as much as 35 in mismatched train test scenarios for automatic speech recognition tasks.
A number of prior publications have extended VAEs to model structured data by altering the underlying graphical model to dynamic Bayesian networks, such as SRNN @cite_10 and VRNN @cite_4 , or to hierarchical models, such as neural statistician @cite_13 and SVAE @cite_37 . These models have shown success in quantitatively increasing the log-likelihood, or qualitatively generating reasonable structured data by sampling. However, it remains unclear whether independent attributes are disentangled in the latent space. Moreover, the learned latent variables in these models are not interpretable without manually inspecting or using labeled data. In contrast, our work presents a VAE framework that addresses both problems by explicitly modeling the difference in the rate of temporal variation of the attributes that operate at different scales.
@cite_13 @cite_37 @cite_10 @cite_4
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The recently developed variational autoencoders (VAEs) have proved to be an effective confluence of the rich representational power of neural networks with Bayesian methods. However, most work on VAEs use a rather simple prior over the latent variables such as standard normal distribution, thereby restricting its applications to relatively simple phenomena. In this work, we propose hierarchical nonparametric variational autoencoders, which combines tree-structured Bayesian nonparametric priors with VAEs, to enable infinite flexibility of the latent representation space. Both the neural parameters and Bayesian priors are learned jointly using tailored variational inference. The resulting model induces a hierarchical structure of latent semantic concepts underlying the data corpus, and infers accurate representations of data instances. We apply our model in video representation learning. Our method is able to discover highly interpretable activity hierarchies, and obtain improved clustering accuracy and generalization capacity based on the learned rich representations. With the introduction of the variational autoencoder (VAE), probabilistic latent variable models have received renewed attention as powerful generative models. However, their performance in terms of test likelihood and quality of generated samples has been surpassed by autoregressive models without stochastic units. Furthermore, flow-based models have recently been shown to be an attractive alternative that scales well to high-dimensional data. In this paper we close the performance gap by constructing VAE models that can effectively utilize a deep hierarchy of stochastic variables and model complex covariance structures. We introduce the Bidirectional-Inference Variational Autoencoder (BIVA), characterized by a skip-connected generative model and an inference network formed by a bidirectional stochastic inference path. We show that BIVA reaches state-of-the-art test likelihoods, generates sharp and coherent natural images, and uses the hierarchy of latent variables to capture different aspects of the data distribution. We observe that BIVA, in contrast to recent results, can be used for anomaly detection. We attribute this to the hierarchy of latent variables which is able to extract high-level semantic features. Finally, we extend BIVA to semi-supervised classification tasks and show that it performs comparably to state-of-the-art results by generative adversarial networks. Variational autoencoders (VAEs), as well as other generative models, have been shown to be efficient and accurate to capture the latent structure of vast amounts of complex high-dimensional data. However, existing VAEs can still not directly handle data that are heterogenous (mixed continuous and discrete) or incomplete (with missing data at random), which is indeed common in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a general framework to design VAEs, suitable for fitting incomplete heterogenous data. The proposed HI-VAE includes likelihood models for real-valued, positive real valued, interval, categorical, ordinal and count data, and allows to estimate (and potentially impute) missing data accurately. Furthermore, HI-VAE presents competitive predictive performance in supervised tasks, outperforming supervised models when trained on incomplete data. Generative models, such as variational auto-encoders (VAE) and generative adversarial networks (GAN), have been immensely successful in approximating image statistics in computer vision. VAEs are useful for unsupervised feature learning, while GANs alleviate supervision by penalizing inaccurate samples using an adversarial game. In order to utilize benefits of these two approaches, we combine the VAE under an adversarial setup with auxiliary label information. We show that factorizing the latent space to separate the information needed for reconstruction (a continuous space) from the information needed for image attribute classification (a discrete space), enables the capability to edit specific attributes of an image.