Deep Distributional Sequence Embeddings Based on a Wasserstein Loss
This work addresses the challenge of capturing statistical patterns in sequences for metric learning, offering a domain-specific improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of embedding sequences by representing them as distributions of deep features rather than vectors, and shows that using a Wasserstein distance metric for training yields better performance than standard vector embeddings and other distance functions.
Deep metric learning employs deep neural networks to embed instances into a metric space such that distances between instances of the same class are small and distances between instances from different classes are large. In most existing deep metric learning techniques, the embedding of an instance is given by a feature vector produced by a deep neural network and Euclidean distance or cosine similarity defines distances between these vectors. In this paper, we study deep distributional embeddings of sequences, where the embedding of a sequence is given by the distribution of learned deep features across the sequence. This has the advantage of capturing statistical information about the distribution of patterns within the sequence in the embedding. When embeddings are distributions rather than vectors, measuring distances between embeddings involves comparing their respective distributions. We propose a distance metric based on Wasserstein distances between the distributions and a corresponding loss function for metric learning, which leads to a novel end-to-end trainable embedding model. We empirically observe that distributional embeddings outperform standard vector embeddings and that training with the proposed Wasserstein metric outperforms training with other distance functions.