Recent Advances in Autoencoder-Based Representation Learning
This is an incremental review paper for researchers in unsupervised learning, summarizing existing methods without new results.
The paper reviews recent advances in autoencoder-based representation learning, organizing methods by mechanisms like regularization and structured priors to enforce properties such as disentanglement, and identifies a tradeoff between prior knowledge and task usefulness.
Learning useful representations with little or no supervision is a key challenge in artificial intelligence. We provide an in-depth review of recent advances in representation learning with a focus on autoencoder-based models. To organize these results we make use of meta-priors believed useful for downstream tasks, such as disentanglement and hierarchical organization of features. In particular, we uncover three main mechanisms to enforce such properties, namely (i) regularizing the (approximate or aggregate) posterior distribution, (ii) factorizing the encoding and decoding distribution, or (iii) introducing a structured prior distribution. While there are some promising results, implicit or explicit supervision remains a key enabler and all current methods use strong inductive biases and modeling assumptions. Finally, we provide an analysis of autoencoder-based representation learning through the lens of rate-distortion theory and identify a clear tradeoff between the amount of prior knowledge available about the downstream tasks, and how useful the representation is for this task.