Disentangled的假设的探讨

Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations

Francesco Locatello, Stefan Bauer, Mario Lucic, Sylvain Gelly, Bernhard Schölkopf, Olivier Bachem

(Submitted on 29 Nov 2018 (v1), last revised 2 Dec 2018 (this version, v2))

In recent years, the interest in unsupervised learning of disentangled representations has significantly increased. The key assumption is that real-world data is generated by a few explanatory factors of variation and that these factors can be recovered by unsupervised learning algorithms. A large number of unsupervised learning approaches based on auto-encoding and quantitative evaluation metrics of disentanglement have been proposed; yet, the efficacy of the proposed approaches and utility of proposed notions of disentanglement has not been challenged in prior work. In this paper, we provide a sober look on 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 the six most prominent methods, and evaluate them across six disentanglement metrics in a reproducible large-scale experimental study on seven different data sets. On the positive side, we observe that different methods successfully enforce properties "encouraged" by the corresponding losses. On the negative side, we observe in our study that well-disentangled models seemingly cannot be identified without access to ground-truth labels even if we are allowed to transfer hyperparameters across data sets. Furthermore, increased disentanglement does not seem to lead to a decreased sample complexity of learning for downstream tasks. 
These 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

Our contributions. The original motivation of this work was to provide a neutral large-scale study that benchmarks different unsupervised disentanglement methods and metrics on a wide set of data sets in a fair, reproducible experimental set up. However, the empirical evidence led us to instead challenge many commonly held assumptions in this field. Our key contributions can be summarized as follows: • We theoretically prove that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is fundamentally impossible without inductive biases both on the considered learning approaches and the data sets. • We investigate current approaches and their inductive biases in a reproducible1 large-scale experimental study with a sound experimental protocol for unsupervised disentanglement learning. We implement from scratch six recent unsupervised disentanglement learning methods as well as six disentanglement measures and train more than 12 000 models on seven data sets. • We evaluate our experimental results and challenge many common assumptions in unsupervised disentanglement learning: (i) While all considered methods prove effective at ensuring that the individual dimensions of the aggregated posterior (which is sampled) are not correlated, only one method also consistently ensures that the individual dimensions of the representation (which is taken to be the mean) are not correlated. (ii) We do not find any evidence that the considered models can be used to reliably learn disentangled representations in an unsupervised manner as random seeds and hyperparameters seem to matter more than the model choice. Furthermore, good trained models seemingly cannot be identified without access to ground-truth labels even if we are allowed to transfer good hyperparameter values across data sets. (iii) For the considered models and data sets, we cannot validate the assumption that disentanglement is useful for downstream tasks, for example through a decreased sample complexity of learning. • Based on these empirical evidence, we suggest three critical areas of further research: (i) The role of inductive biases and implicit and explicit supervision should be made explicit: unsupervised model selection persists as a key question. (ii) The concrete practical benefits of enforcing a specific notion of disentanglement of the learned representations should be demonstrated. (iii) Experiments should be conducted in a reproducible experimental setup on data sets of varying degrees of difficulty.