DOT-VAE: Disentangling One Factor at a Time
This addresses the problem of data interpretation in machine learning for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it extends existing disentanglement methods to real-world data.
The paper tackles unsupervised disentanglement of latent factors in real-world datasets by proposing DOT-VAE, a framework that learns to separate interpretable factors one at a time without prior assumptions, achieving quantitative and qualitative effectiveness on synthetic and real datasets like CelebA.
As we enter the era of machine learning characterized by an overabundance of data, discovery, organization, and interpretation of the data in an unsupervised manner becomes a critical need. One promising approach to this endeavour is the problem of Disentanglement, which aims at learning the underlying generative latent factors, called the factors of variation, of the data and encoding them in disjoint latent representations. Recent advances have made efforts to solve this problem for synthetic datasets generated by a fixed set of independent factors of variation. Here, we propose to extend this to real-world datasets with a countable number of factors of variations. We propose a novel framework which augments the latent space of a Variational Autoencoders with a disentangled space and is trained using a Wake-Sleep-inspired two-step algorithm for unsupervised disentanglement. Our network learns to disentangle interpretable, independent factors from the data ``one at a time", and encode it in different dimensions of the disentangled latent space, while making no prior assumptions about the number of factors or their joint distribution. We demonstrate its quantitative and qualitative effectiveness by evaluating the latent representations learned on two synthetic benchmark datasets; DSprites and 3DShapes and on a real datasets CelebA.