The key idea of variational auto-encoders (VAEs) resembles that of traditional auto-encoder models in which spatial information is supposed to be explicitly encoded in the latent space. However, the latent variables in VAEs are vectors, which can be interpreted as multiple feature maps of size 1x1. Such representations can only convey spatial information implicitly when coupled with powerful decoders. In this work, we propose spatial VAEs that use feature maps of larger size as latent variables to explicitly capture spatial information. This is achieved by allowing the latent variables to be sampled from matrix-variate normal (MVN) distributions whose parameters are computed from the encoder network. To increase dependencies among locations on latent feature maps and reduce the number of parameters, we further propose spatial VAEs via low-rank MVN distributions. Experimental results show that the proposed spatial VAEs outperform original VAEs in capturing rich structural and spatial information.
Auto-encoder (AE) is a model architecture used in tasks like image segmentation @cite_20 @cite_27 @cite_21 , machine translation @cite_2 @cite_12 and denoising reconstruction @cite_11 @cite_29 . It consists of two parts: an encoder that encodes the input data into lower-dimensional latent representations and a decoder that generates outputs by decoding the representations. Depending on different tasks, the latent representations will focus on different properties of input data. Nevertheless, these tasks usually require outputs to have similar or exactly the same structure as inputs. Thus, structural information is expected to be preserved through the encoder-decoder process.
@cite_29 @cite_21 @cite_27 @cite_2 @cite_20 @cite_12 @cite_11
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We explore an original strategy for building deep networks, based on stacking layers of denoising autoencoders which are trained locally to denoise corrupted versions of their inputs. The resulting algorithm is a straightforward variation on the stacking of ordinary autoencoders. It is however shown on a benchmark of classification problems to yield significantly lower classification error, thus bridging the performance gap with deep belief networks (DBN), and in several cases surpassing it. Higher level representations learnt in this purely unsupervised fashion also help boost the performance of subsequent SVM classifiers. Qualitative experiments show that, contrary to ordinary autoencoders, denoising autoencoders are able to learn Gabor-like edge detectors from natural image patches and larger stroke detectors from digit images. This work clearly establishes the value of using a denoising criterion as a tractable unsupervised objective to guide the learning of useful higher level representations. Convolutional networks are powerful visual models that yield hierarchies of features. We show that convolutional networks by themselves, trained end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels, exceed the state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation. Our key insight is to build "fully convolutional" networks that take input of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with efficient inference and learning. We define and detail the space of fully convolutional networks, explain their application to spatially dense prediction tasks, and draw connections to prior models. We adapt contemporary classification networks (AlexNet, the VGG net, and GoogLeNet) into fully convolutional networks and transfer their learned representations by fine-tuning to the segmentation task. We then define a novel architecture that combines semantic information from a deep, coarse layer with appearance information from a shallow, fine layer to produce accurate and detailed segmentations. Our fully convolutional network achieves state-of-the-art segmentation of PASCAL VOC (20 relative improvement to 62.2 mean IU on 2012), NYUDv2, and SIFT Flow, while inference takes one third of a second for a typical image. There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http: lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de people ronneber u-net . Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult learning tasks. Although DNNs work well whenever large labeled training sets are available, they cannot be used to map sequences to sequences. In this paper, we present a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure. Our method uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector. Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT'14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, where the LSTM's BLEU score was penalized on out-of-vocabulary words. Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences. For comparison, a phrase-based SMT system achieves a BLEU score of 33.3 on the same dataset. When we used the LSTM to rerank the 1000 hypotheses produced by the aforementioned SMT system, its BLEU score increases to 36.5, which is close to the previous best result on this task. The LSTM also learned sensible phrase and sentence representations that are sensitive to word order and are relatively invariant to the active and the passive voice. Finally, we found that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences (but not target sentences) improved the LSTM's performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier. Previous work has shown that the difficulties in learning deep generative or discriminative models can be overcome by an initial unsupervised learning step that maps inputs to useful intermediate representations. We introduce and motivate a new training principle for unsupervised learning of a representation based on the idea of making the learned representations robust to partial corruption of the input pattern. This approach can be used to train autoencoders, and these denoising autoencoders can be stacked to initialize deep architectures. The algorithm can be motivated from a manifold learning and information theoretic perspective or from a generative model perspective. Comparative experiments clearly show the surprising advantage of corrupting the input of autoencoders on a pattern classification benchmark suite.