text: We introduce a method for disentangling independently controllable and uncontrollable factors of variation by interacting with the world. Disentanglement leads to good representations and it is important when applying deep neural networks (DNNs) in fields where explanations are necessary. This article focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) approach for disentangling factors of variation, however, previous methods lacks a mechanism for representing uncontrollable obstacles. To tackle this problem, we train two DNNs simultaneously: one that represents the controllable object and another that represents the uncontrollable obstacles. During training, we used the parameters from a previous RL-based model as our initial parameters to improve stability. We also conduct simple toy simulations to show that our model can indeed disentangle controllable and uncontrollable factors of variation and that it is effective for a task involving the acquisition of extrinsic rewards.
  @cite_30: Variational autoencoders (VAEs) learn representations of data by jointly training a probabilistic encoder and decoder network. Typically these models encode all features of the data into a single variable. Here we are interested in learning disentangled representations that encode distinct aspects of the data into separate variables. We propose to learn such representations using model architectures that generalise from standard VAEs, employing a general graphical model structure in the encoder and decoder. This allows us to train partially-specified models that make relatively strong assumptions about a subset of interpretable variables and rely on the flexibility of neural networks to learn representations for the remaining variables. We further define a general objective for semi-supervised learning in this model class, which can be approximated using an importance sampling procedure. We evaluate our framework's ability to learn disentangled representations, both by qualitative exploration of its generative capacity, and quantitative evaluation of its discriminative ability on a variety of models and datasets.
  @cite_33: Many latent factors of variation interact to generate sensory data; for example, pose, morphology and expression in face images. In this work, we propose to learn manifold coordinates for the relevant factors of variation and to model their joint interaction. Many existing feature learning algorithms focus on a single task and extract features that are sensitive to the task-relevant factors and invariant to all others. However, models that just extract a single set of invariant features do not exploit the relationships among the latent factors. To address this, we propose a higher-order Boltzmann machine that incorporates multiplicative interactions among groups of hidden units that each learn to encode a distinct factor of variation. Furthermore, we propose correspondence-based training strategies that allow effective disentangling. Our model achieves state-of-the-art emotion recognition and face verification performance on the Toronto Face Database. We also demonstrate disentangled features learned on the CMU Multi-PIE dataset.
  @cite_7: 
  @cite_8: We study the problem of building models that disentangle independent factors of variation. Such models could be used to encode features that can efficiently be used for classification and to transfer attributes between different images in image synthesis. As data we use a weakly labeled training set. Our weak labels indicate what single factor has changed between two data samples, although the relative value of the change is unknown. This labeling is of particular interest as it may be readily available without annotation costs. To make use of weak labels we introduce an autoencoder model and train it through constraints on image pairs and triplets. We formally prove that without additional knowledge there is no guarantee that two images with the same factor of variation will be mapped to the same feature. We call this issue the reference ambiguity. Moreover, we show the role of the feature dimensionality and adversarial training. We demonstrate experimentally that the proposed model can successfully transfer attributes on several datasets, but show also cases when the reference ambiguity occurs.
  @cite_9: Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on large-scale datasets have recently achieved impressive improvements in face recognition. But a persistent challenge remains to develop methods capable of handling large pose variations that are relatively underrepresented in training data. This paper presents a method for learning a feature representation that is invariant to pose, without requiring extensive pose coverage in training data. We first propose to generate non-frontal views from a single frontal face, in order to increase the diversity of training data while preserving accurate facial details that are critical for identity discrimination. Our next contribution is to seek a rich embedding that encodes identity features, as well as non-identity ones such as pose and landmark locations. Finally, we propose a new feature reconstruction metric learning to explicitly disentangle identity and pose, by demanding alignment between the feature reconstructions through various combinations of identity and pose features, which is obtained from two images of the same subject. Experiments on both controlled and in-the-wild face datasets, such as MultiPIE, 300WLP and the profile view database CFP, show that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art, especially on images with large head pose variations. Detail results and resource are referred to this https URL
  @cite_21: The large pose discrepancy between two face images is one of the key challenges in face recognition. Conventional approaches for pose-invariant face recognition either perform face frontalization on, or learn a pose-invariant representation from, a non-frontal face image. We argue that it is more desirable to perform both tasks jointly to allow them to leverage each other. To this end, this paper proposes Disentangled Representation learning-Generative Adversarial Network (DR-GAN) with three distinct novelties. First, the encoder-decoder structure of the generator allows DR-GAN to learn a generative and discriminative representation, in addition to image synthesis. Second, this representation is explicitly disentangled from other face variations such as pose, through the pose code provided to the decoder and pose estimation in the discriminator. Third, DR-GAN can take one or multiple images as the input, and generate one unified representation along with an arbitrary number of synthetic images. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation on both controlled and in-the-wild databases demonstrate the superiority of DR-GAN over the state of the art.
  @cite_10: 
  @cite_25: 
summary: All supervised learning-based approaches use the labeled information to disentangle features. For example, @cite_33 proposed a restricted Boltzmann machine-based method that considered a complicated manifolds as collections of sub-manifolds. @cite_30 combined a semi-supervised VAE @cite_25 and a probabilistic graphical model. @cite_9 proposed a hierarchical model that first disentangled identity and non-identity features from face images and then disentangled poses and landmarks from the non-identity features. @cite_21 proposed a disentangled representation learning method for pose-invariant face recognition based on a GAN @cite_7 . To disentangle the GAN generator's input variables, @cite_8 used a VAE, and @cite_10 proposed a semi-supervised InfoGAN.