Objects are composed of a set of geometrically organized parts. We introduce an unsupervised capsule autoencoder (SCAE), which explicitly uses geometric relationships between parts to reason about objects. Since these relationships do not depend on the viewpoint, our model is robust to viewpoint changes. SCAE consists of two stages. In the first stage, the model predicts presences and poses of part templates directly from the image and tries to reconstruct the image by appropriately arranging the templates. In the second stage, SCAE predicts parameters of a few object capsules, which are then used to reconstruct part poses. Inference in this model is amortized and performed by off-the-shelf neural encoders, unlike in previous capsule networks. We find that object capsule presences are highly informative of the object class, which leads to state-of-the-art results for unsupervised classification on SVHN (55%) and MNIST (98.7%). The code is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/stacked_capsule_autoencoders
We present a novel clustering objective that learns a neural network classifier from scratch, given only unlabelled data samples. The model discovers clusters that accurately match semantic classes, achieving state-of-the-art results in eight unsupervised clustering benchmarks spanning image classification and segmentation. These include STL10, an unsupervised variant of ImageNet, and CIFAR10, where we significantly beat the accuracy of our closest competitors by 6.6 and 9.5 absolute percentage points respectively. The method is not specialised to computer vision and operates on any paired dataset samples; in our experiments we use random transforms to obtain a pair from each image. The trained network directly outputs semantic labels, rather than high dimensional representations that need external processing to be usable for semantic clustering. The objective is simply to maximise mutual information between the class assignments of each pair. It is easy to implement and rigorously grounded in information theory, meaning we effortlessly avoid degenerate solutions that other clustering methods are susceptible to. In addition to the fully unsupervised mode, we also test two semi-supervised settings. The first achieves 88.8% accuracy on STL10 classification, setting a new global state-of-the-art over all existing methods (whether supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised). The second shows robustness to 90% reductions in label coverage, of relevance to applications that wish to make use of small amounts of labels. github.com/xu-ji/IIC
Variational Autoencoders are powerful models for unsupervised learning. However deep models with several layers of dependent stochastic variables are difficult to train which limits the improvements obtained using these highly expressive models. We propose a new inference model, the Ladder Variational Autoencoder, that recursively corrects the generative distribution by a data dependent approximate likelihood in a process resembling the recently proposed Ladder Network. We show that this model provides state of the art predictive log-likelihood and tighter log-likelihood lower bound compared to the purely bottom-up inference in layered Variational Autoencoders and other generative models. We provide a detailed analysis of the learned hierarchical latent representation and show that our new inference model is qualitatively different and utilizes a deeper more distributed hierarchy of latent variables. Finally, we observe that batch normalization and deterministic warm-up (gradually turning on the KL-term) are crucial for training variational models with many stochastic layers.
Combining Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with encoders that learn to encode data points has shown promising results in learning data representations in an unsupervised way. We propose a framework that combines an encoder and a generator to learn disentangled representations which encode meaningful information about the data distribution without the need for any labels. While current approaches focus mostly on the generative aspects of GANs, our framework can be used to perform inference on both real and generated data points. Experiments on several data sets show that the encoder learns interpretable, disentangled representations which encode descriptive properties and can be used to sample images that exhibit specific characteristics.