Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximizationR Devon Hjelm, Alex Fedorov, Samuel Lavoie-Marchildon et al.
In this work, we perform unsupervised learning of representations by maximizing mutual information between an input and the output of a deep neural network encoder. Importantly, we show that structure matters: incorporating knowledge about locality of the input to the objective can greatly influence a representation's suitability for downstream tasks. We further control characteristics of the representation by matching to a prior distribution adversarially. Our method, which we call Deep InfoMax (DIM), outperforms a number of popular unsupervised learning methods and competes with fully-supervised learning on several classification tasks. DIM opens new avenues for unsupervised learning of representations and is an important step towards flexible formulations of representation-learning objectives for specific end-goals.
Learning with Pseudo-EnsemblesPhilip Bachman, Ouais Alsharif, Doina Precup
We formalize the notion of a pseudo-ensemble, a (possibly infinite) collection of child models spawned from a parent model by perturbing it according to some noise process. E.g., dropout (Hinton et. al, 2012) in a deep neural network trains a pseudo-ensemble of child subnetworks generated by randomly masking nodes in the parent network. We present a novel regularizer based on making the behavior of a pseudo-ensemble robust with respect to the noise process generating it. In the fully-supervised setting, our regularizer matches the performance of dropout. But, unlike dropout, our regularizer naturally extends to the semi-supervised setting, where it produces state-of-the-art results. We provide a case study in which we transform the Recursive Neural Tensor Network of (Socher et. al, 2013) into a pseudo-ensemble, which significantly improves its performance on a real-world sentiment analysis benchmark.