Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations

Francesco Locatello, Stefan Bauer, Mario Lucic, Gunnar Raetsch, Sylvain Gelly, Bernhard Schölkopf, Olivier Bachem
Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 97:4114-4124, 2019.

Abstract

The key idea behind the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is that real-world data is generated by a few explanatory factors of variation which can be recovered by unsupervised learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide a sober look at recent progress in the field and challenge some common assumptions. We first theoretically show that the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is fundamentally impossible without inductive biases on both the models and the data. Then, we train more than $12000$ models covering most prominent methods and evaluation metrics in a reproducible large-scale experimental study on seven different data sets. We observe that while the different methods successfully enforce properties “encouraged” by the corresponding losses, well-disentangled models seemingly cannot be identified without supervision. Furthermore, increased disentanglement does not seem to lead to a decreased sample complexity of learning for downstream tasks. Our results suggest that future work on disentanglement learning should be explicit about the role of inductive biases and (implicit) supervision, investigate concrete benefits of enforcing disentanglement of the learned representations, and consider a reproducible experimental setup covering several data sets.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v97-locatello19a, title = {Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations}, author = {Locatello, Francesco and Bauer, Stefan and Lucic, Mario and Raetsch, Gunnar and Gelly, Sylvain and Sch{\"o}lkopf, Bernhard and Bachem, Olivier}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {4114--4124}, year = {2019}, editor = {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Salakhutdinov, Ruslan}, volume = {97}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {09--15 Jun}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/locatello19a/locatello19a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/locatello19a.html}, abstract = {The key idea behind the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is that real-world data is generated by a few explanatory factors of variation which can be recovered by unsupervised learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide a sober look at recent progress in the field and challenge some common assumptions. We first theoretically show that the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is fundamentally impossible without inductive biases on both the models and the data. Then, we train more than $12000$ models covering most prominent methods and evaluation metrics in a reproducible large-scale experimental study on seven different data sets. We observe that while the different methods successfully enforce properties “encouraged” by the corresponding losses, well-disentangled models seemingly cannot be identified without supervision. Furthermore, increased disentanglement does not seem to lead to a decreased sample complexity of learning for downstream tasks. Our results suggest that future work on disentanglement learning should be explicit about the role of inductive biases and (implicit) supervision, investigate concrete benefits of enforcing disentanglement of the learned representations, and consider a reproducible experimental setup covering several data sets.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations %A Francesco Locatello %A Stefan Bauer %A Mario Lucic %A Gunnar Raetsch %A Sylvain Gelly %A Bernhard Schölkopf %A Olivier Bachem %B Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2019 %E Kamalika Chaudhuri %E Ruslan Salakhutdinov %F pmlr-v97-locatello19a %I PMLR %P 4114--4124 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/locatello19a.html %V 97 %X The key idea behind the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is that real-world data is generated by a few explanatory factors of variation which can be recovered by unsupervised learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide a sober look at recent progress in the field and challenge some common assumptions. We first theoretically show that the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is fundamentally impossible without inductive biases on both the models and the data. Then, we train more than $12000$ models covering most prominent methods and evaluation metrics in a reproducible large-scale experimental study on seven different data sets. We observe that while the different methods successfully enforce properties “encouraged” by the corresponding losses, well-disentangled models seemingly cannot be identified without supervision. Furthermore, increased disentanglement does not seem to lead to a decreased sample complexity of learning for downstream tasks. Our results suggest that future work on disentanglement learning should be explicit about the role of inductive biases and (implicit) supervision, investigate concrete benefits of enforcing disentanglement of the learned representations, and consider a reproducible experimental setup covering several data sets.
APA
Locatello, F., Bauer, S., Lucic, M., Raetsch, G., Gelly, S., Schölkopf, B. & Bachem, O.. (2019). Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations. Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 97:4114-4124 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/locatello19a.html.

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