Pascal Vincent

Karsten Roth, Mark Ibrahim, Zeynep Akata et al.

A grand goal in deep learning research is to learn representations capable of generalizing across distribution shifts. Disentanglement is one promising direction aimed at aligning a model's representation with the underlying factors generating the data (e.g. color or background). Existing disentanglement methods, however, rely on an often unrealistic assumption: that factors are statistically independent. In reality, factors (like object color and shape) are correlated. To address this limitation, we consider the use of a relaxed disentanglement criterion -- the Hausdorff Factorized Support (HFS) criterion -- that encourages only pairwise factorized \emph{support}, rather than a factorial distribution, by minimizing a Hausdorff distance. This allows for arbitrary distributions of the factors over their support, including correlations between them. We show that the use of HFS consistently facilitates disentanglement and recovery of ground-truth factors across a variety of correlation settings and benchmarks, even under severe training correlations and correlation shifts, with in parts over $+60\%$ in relative improvement over existing disentanglement methods. In addition, we find that leveraging HFS for representation learning can even facilitate transfer to downstream tasks such as classification under distribution shifts. We hope our original approach and positive empirical results inspire further progress on the open problem of robust generalization. Code available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/disentangling-correlated-factors.

Florian Bordes, Randall Balestriero, Pascal Vincent

Discovering what is learned by neural networks remains a challenge. In self-supervised learning, classification is the most common task used to evaluate how good a representation is. However, relying only on such downstream task can limit our understanding of what information is retained in the representation of a given input. In this work, we showcase the use of a Representation Conditional Diffusion Model (RCDM) to visualize in data space the representations learned by self-supervised models. The use of RCDM is motivated by its ability to generate high-quality samples -- on par with state-of-the-art generative models -- while ensuring that the representations of those samples are faithful i.e. close to the one used for conditioning. By using RCDM to analyze self-supervised models, we are able to clearly show visually that i) SSL (backbone) representation are not invariant to the data augmentations they were trained with -- thus debunking an often restated but mistaken belief; ii) SSL post-projector embeddings appear indeed invariant to these data augmentation, along with many other data symmetries; iii) SSL representations appear more robust to small adversarial perturbation of their inputs than representations trained in a supervised manner; and iv) that SSL-trained representations exhibit an inherent structure that can be explored thanks to RCDM visualization and enables image manipulation.

Gabriel Huang, Hugo Berard, Ahmed Touati et al.

Parametric adversarial divergences, which are a generalization of the losses used to train generative adversarial networks (GANs), have often been described as being approximations of their nonparametric counterparts, such as the Jensen-Shannon divergence, which can be derived under the so-called optimal discriminator assumption. In this position paper, we argue that despite being "non-optimal", parametric divergences have distinct properties from their nonparametric counterparts which can make them more suitable for learning high-dimensional distributions. A key property is that parametric divergences are only sensitive to certain aspects/moments of the distribution, which depend on the architecture of the discriminator and the loss it was trained with. In contrast, nonparametric divergences such as the Kullback-Leibler divergence are sensitive to moments ignored by the discriminator, but they do not necessarily correlate with sample quality (Theis et al., 2016). Similarly, we show that mutual information can lead to unintuitive interpretations, and explore more intuitive alternatives based on parametric divergences. We conclude that parametric divergences are a flexible framework for defining statistical quantities relevant to a specific modeling task.