We present a neural rendering architecture that helps variational autoencoders (VAEs) learn disentangled representations. Instead of the deconvolutional network typically used in the decoder of VAEs, we tile (broadcast) the latent vector across space, concatenate fixed X- and Y-“coordinate” channels, and apply a fully convolutional network with 1x1 stride. This provides an architectural prior for dissociating positional from non-positional features in the latent space, yet without providing any explicit supervision to this effect. We show that this architecture, which we term the Spatial Broadcast decoder, improves disentangling, reconstruction accuracy, and generalization to held-out regions in data space.   We show the Spatial Broadcast Decoder is complementary to state-of-the-art (SOTA) disentangling techniques and when incorporated improves their performance. Knowledge transfer and generalization are hallmarks of human intelligence. From grammatical generalization when learning a new language to visual generalization when interpreting a Picasso, humans have an extreme ability to recognize and apply learned patterns in new contexts. Current machine learning algorithms pale in contrast, suffering from overfitting, adversarial attacks, and domain specialization BID12 BID16 . We believe that one fruitful approach to improve generalization in machine learning is to learn compositional representations in an unsupervised manner. A compositional representation consists of components that can be recombined, and such recombination underlies generalization. For example, consider a pink elephant. With a representation that composes color and object independently, imagining a pink elephant is trivial. However, a pink elephant may not be within the scope of a representation that mixes color and object. Compositionality comes in a variety of flavors, including feature compositionality (e.g. pink elephant), multi-object compositionality (e.g. elephant next to a penguin), and relational compositionality (e.g. the smallest elephant). In this work we focus on feature compositionality. Here we present the Spatial Broadcast decoder for Variational Autoencoders. We demonstrate that it improves learned latent representations, most dramatically for datasets with objects varying in position. It also improves generalization in latent space and can be incorporated into SOTA models to boost their performance in terms of both disentangling and reconstruction accuracy. We believe that learning compositional representations is an important ingredient for flexibility and generalization in many contexts, from supervised learning to reinforcement learning, and the Spatial Broadcast decoder is one step towards robust compositional visual representation learning.
We introduce a neural rendering architecture that helps VAEs learn disentangled latent representations.
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