In plain words: A system that learns to guess the hidden structure of images is trained across many related data sets at once, so it can reuse what it learns on new kinds of images. On handwritten digits, its features beat the usual single-data-set training by 10-50% on classification tasks.
Abstract
Despite the recent success in probabilistic modeling and their applications, generative models trained using traditional inference techniques struggle to adapt to new distributions, even when the target distribution may be closely related to the ones seen during training. In this work, we present a doubly-amortized variational inference procedure as a way to address this challenge. By sharing computation across not only a set of query inputs, but also a set of different, related probabilistic models, we learn transferable latent representations that generalize across several related distributions. In particular, given a set of distributions over images, we find the learned representations to transfer to different data transformations. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by introducing the MetaVAE, and show that it significantly outperforms baselines on downstream image classification tasks on MNIST (10-50%) and NORB (10-35%).
Mike Wu, Kristy Choi, Noah Goodman, Stefano Ermon
arXiv:1902.01950 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Feb 5, 2019 · updated Sep 15, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · First 2 authors contributed equally