Learning multi-modal generative models with permutation-invariant encoders and tighter variational bounds

Devising deep latent variable models for multi-modal data has been a long-standing theme in machine learning research. Multi-modal Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been a popular generative model class that learns latent representations which jointly explain multiple modalities. Various objective functions for such models have been suggested, often motivated as lower bounds on the multi-modal data log-likelihood or from information-theoretic considerations. In order to encode latent variables from different modality subsets, Product-of-Experts (PoE) or Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) aggregation schemes have been routinely used and shown to yield different trade-offs, for instance, regarding their generative quality or consistency across multiple modalities. In this work, we consider a variational bound that can tightly lower bound the data log-likelihood. We develop more flexible aggregation schemes that generalise PoE or MoE approaches by combining encoded features from different modalities based on permutation-invariant neural networks. Our numerical experiments illustrate trade-offs for multi-modal variational bounds and various aggregation schemes. We show that tighter variational bounds and more flexible aggregation models can become beneficial when one wants to approximate the true joint distribution over observed modalities and latent variables in identifiable models.