Disentangled representations in neural models

• Main Author: Whitney, William, M. Eng (William F.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Other Authors: Joshua B. Tenenbaum.
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2017
• Subjects: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106449

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016. === Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. === Includes bibliographical references (pages 57-62). === Representation learning is the foundation for the recent success of neural network models. However, the distributed representations generated by neural networks are far from ideal. Due to their highly entangled nature, they are difficult to reuse and interpret, and they do a poor job of capturing the sparsity which is present in real-world transformations. In this paper, I describe methods for learning disentangled representations in the two domains of graphics and computation. These methods allow neural methods to learn representations which are easy to interpret and reuse, yet they incur little or no penalty to performance. In the Graphics section, I demonstrate the ability of these methods to infer the generating parameters of images and rerender those images under novel conditions. In the Computation section, I describe a model which is able to factorize a multitask learning problem into subtasks and which experiences no catastrophic forgetting. Together these techniques provide the tools to design a wide range of models that learn disentangled representations and better model the factors of variation in the real world. === by William Whitney. === M. Eng.