Operational Latent Spaces
This work addresses the challenge of designing interpretable and manipulable latent representations for developers in fields like music, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing self-supervised learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of constructing latent spaces that support semantically meaningful operations through self-supervised learning, resulting in the development of 'operational latent spaces' (OpLaS) that enable transformational operations with inherent semantic meaning, such as using a novel 'FiLMR' layer to create ring-like symmetries for musical applications.
We investigate the construction of latent spaces through self-supervised learning to support semantically meaningful operations. Analogous to operational amplifiers, these "operational latent spaces" (OpLaS) not only demonstrate semantic structure such as clustering but also support common transformational operations with inherent semantic meaning. Some operational latent spaces are found to have arisen "unintentionally" in the progress toward some (other) self-supervised learning objective, in which unintended but still useful properties are discovered among the relationships of points in the space. Other spaces may be constructed "intentionally" by developers stipulating certain kinds of clustering or transformations intended to produce the desired structure. We focus on the intentional creation of operational latent spaces via self-supervised learning, including the introduction of rotation operators via a novel "FiLMR" layer, which can be used to enable ring-like symmetries found in some musical constructions.