Lirong He

Qingzhong Ai, Lirong He, Shiyu Liu et al.

Recent studies show that advanced priors play a major role in deep generative models. Exemplar VAE, as a variant of VAE with an exemplar-based prior, has achieved impressive results. However, due to the nature of model design, an exemplar-based model usually requires vast amounts of data to participate in training, which leads to huge computational complexity. To address this issue, we propose Bayesian Pseudocoresets Exemplar VAE (ByPE-VAE), a new variant of VAE with a prior based on Bayesian pseudocoreset. The proposed prior is conditioned on a small-scale pseudocoreset rather than the whole dataset for reducing the computational cost and avoiding overfitting. Simultaneously, we obtain the optimal pseudocoreset via a stochastic optimization algorithm during VAE training aiming to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the prior based on the pseudocoreset and that based on the whole dataset. Experimental results show that ByPE-VAE can achieve competitive improvements over the state-of-the-art VAEs in the tasks of density estimation, representation learning, and generative data augmentation. Particularly, on a basic VAE architecture, ByPE-VAE is up to 3 times faster than Exemplar VAE while almost holding the performance. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Aiqz/ByPE-VAE}.

Liangjian Wen, Yiji Zhou, Lirong He et al.

Mutual Information (MI) plays an important role in representation learning. However, MI is unfortunately intractable in continuous and high-dimensional settings. Recent advances establish tractable and scalable MI estimators to discover useful representation. However, most of the existing methods are not capable of providing an accurate estimation of MI with low-variance when the MI is large. We argue that directly estimating the gradients of MI is more appealing for representation learning than estimating MI in itself. To this end, we propose the Mutual Information Gradient Estimator (MIGE) for representation learning based on the score estimation of implicit distributions. MIGE exhibits a tight and smooth gradient estimation of MI in the high-dimensional and large-MI settings. We expand the applications of MIGE in both unsupervised learning of deep representations based on InfoMax and the Information Bottleneck method. Experimental results have indicated significant performance improvement in learning useful representation.

Lirong He, Ziyi Guo, Kaizhu Huang et al.

Deep neural networks enjoy a powerful representation and have proven effective in a number of applications. However, recent advances show that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks incurred by the so-called adversarial examples. Although the adversarial example is only slightly different from the input sample, the neural network classifies it as the wrong class. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose the Deep Minimax Probability Machine (DeepMPM), which applies MPM to deep neural networks in an end-to-end fashion. In a worst-case scenario, MPM tries to minimize an upper bound of misclassification probabilities, considering the global information (i.e., mean and covariance information of each class). DeepMPM can be more robust since it learns the worst-case bound on the probability of misclassification of future data. Experiments on two real-world datasets can achieve comparable classification performance with CNN, while can be more robust on adversarial attacks.