Variational Autoencoders: Advanced Techniques and Representation Learning
Chapter 1: Foundations of Probabilistic Generative Models and Representation Learning
Probabilistic Models: An Advanced Perspective
Latent Variable Models: Theory and Formulation
Core Principles of Representation Learning
Evaluating Representation Quality: Metrics and Methodologies
Autoencoders Revisited: Limitations for Generative Tasks
Information Theory in Representation Learning
Chapter 2: Variational Autoencoders: Mathematical Deep Dive
VAE Derivation: Variational Inference
The Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) Formulation
The Reparameterization Trick
KL Divergence in VAEs: Role and Interpretation
VAE Encoder and Decoder Network Design
Common VAE Training Difficulties
Analysis of VAE Objective Functions
Hands-on Practical: VAE Implementation and Diagnostics
Chapter 3: Advanced VAE Architectures and Modifications
Conditional VAEs (CVAEs) for Controlled Generation
Hierarchical VAEs for Complex Data Structures
Vector Quantized VAEs (VQ-VAEs)
Autoregressive Decoders in VAEs
Normalizing Flows for Flexible Priors and Posteriors
Beta-VAEs for Disentangled Representations
FactorVAEs and Total Correlation VAEs (TCVAEs)
Hands-on Practical: Implementing Advanced VAE Architectures
Chapter 4: Inference Techniques and Amortization in VAEs
Amortized Variational Inference: Strengths and Weaknesses
Limitations of Mean-Field Approximations
Structured Variational Inference in VAEs
Importance Weighted Autoencoders (IWAEs)
Auxiliary Variables and Semi-Amortized Variational Inference
Variational Inference with Implicit Models
Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB)
Practice: Implementing IWAEs and Advanced Inference
Chapter 5: Disentangled Representation Learning with VAEs
Defining Disentanglement: Formulations and Difficulties
Metrics for Quantifying Disentanglement
The Influence of KL Regularization on Disentanglement
Information Bottleneck Theory and VAEs for Disentanglement
Adversarial Training for Disentanglement
Group-Theoretic Approaches to Disentanglement
Identifiability and Limitations in Disentanglement Learning
Hands-on Practical: Training and Evaluating Disentangled VAEs
Chapter 6: VAEs for Sequential and Structured Data
Recurrent VAEs (RVAEs) for Time Series Modeling
VAEs with Attention Mechanisms for Sequences
Graph VAEs for Structured Data Representation
VAEs in Natural Language Processing
Temporal VAEs for Video and Dynamic Systems
Connections between State-Space Models and VAEs
Practice: Implementing VAEs for Sequential Data
Chapter 7: Advanced Topics and Extensions of VAEs
Semi-Supervised Learning with VAEs
VAEs for Anomaly Detection and Out-of-Distribution Detection
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) vs. VAEs: A Comparative Analysis
Hybrid Models: VAE-GANs and Adversarial Autoencoders (AAEs)
VAEs in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Denoising VAEs and Input Perturbation Robustness
Advanced Optimization Strategies for VAEs
Hands-on Practical: Exploring Hybrid VAE-GAN Architectures
Adversarial Training for Disentanglement
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- Generative Adversarial Nets, Ian J. Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio, 2014 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Vol. 27 (Curran Associates, Inc.) - Introduces the foundational concept of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and the minimax game formulation, which underpins all adversarial training methods discussed.
- Adversarial Autoencoders, Alireza Makhzani, Jon Shlens, Navdeep Jaitly, Ian Goodfellow, and Brendan Frey, 2015 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1511.05644 - Presents Adversarial Autoencoders (AAEs), an early and influential work applying adversarial training to autoencoders to match the aggregated posterior to a prior distribution, a strategy mentioned for disentanglement.
- InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets, Xi Chen, Yan Duan, Rein Houthooft, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, Pieter Abbeel, 2016 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 (NeurIPS) - Introduces InfoGAN, a method for learning disentangled and interpretable representations by maximizing the mutual information between a subset of latent variables and the observations within a GAN framework. This influenced later VAE-based adversarial disentanglement.
- Disentangling by Factorizing Variation, Hyunjik Kim and Andriy Mnih, 2018 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Vol. 80 (PMLR (Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)) DOI: 10.5591/mlr.2018.0649 - Presents FactorVAE, a specific and influential VAE-based method that employs adversarial training to estimate and minimize the Total Correlation of latent dimensions, directly leading to disentanglement.