2020/10/07 by Benoit Gaujac, Gaujac, Benoit, Ilya Feige +3
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Model Reduction and Neural Networks
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2010.03467
openalex publication_date 2020/10/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Probabilistic models with hierarchical-latent-variable structures provide state-of-the-art results amongst non-autoregressive, unsupervised density-based models. However, the most common approach to training such models based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) often fails to leverage deep-latent hierarchies; successful approaches require complex inference and optimisation schemes. Optimal Transport is an alternative, non-likelihood-based framework for training generative models with appealing theoretical properties, in principle allowing easier training convergence between distributions. In this work we propose a novel approach to training models with deep-latent hierarchies based on Optimal Transport, without the need for highly bespoke models and inference networks. We show that our method enables the generative model to fully leverage its deep-latent hierarchy, avoiding the well known "latent variable collapse" issue of VAEs; therefore, providing qualitatively better sample generations as well as more interpretable latent representation than the original Wasserstein Autoencoder with Maximum Mean Discrepancy divergence.