Disentangled Representation Learning and Generation with Manifold Optimization

Disentanglement is a useful property in representation learning which increases the interpretability of generative models such as Variational Auto-Encoders (VAE), Generative Adversarial Models, and their many variants. Typically in such models, an increase in disentanglement performance is traded-off with generation quality. In the context of latent space models, this work presents a representation learning framework that explicitly promotes disentanglement by encouraging orthogonal directions of variations. The proposed objective is the sum of an auto-encoder error term along with a Principal Component Analysis reconstruction error in the feature space. This has an interpretation of a Restricted Kernel Machine with an interconnection matrix on the Stiefel manifold. Our analysis shows that such a construction promotes disentanglement by matching the principal directions in latent space with the directions of orthogonal variation in data space. The training algorithm involves a stochastic optimization method on the Stiefel manifold, which increases only marginally the computing time compared to an analogous VAE. Our theoretical discussion and various experiments show that the proposed model improves over many VAE variants in terms of both generation quality and disentangled representation learning.