ControlVAE: Controllable variational autoencoder

Huajie Z. Shao, Shuochao Yao, Dachun Sun, Aston Zhang, Shengzhong Liu, Dongxin Liu, Jun Wang, Tarek Abdelzaher

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Variational Autoencoders (VAE) and their variants have been widely used in a variety of applications, such as dialog generation, image generation and disentangled representation learning. However, the existing VAE models may suffer from KL vanishing in language modeling and low reconstruction quality for disentangling. To address these issues, we propose a novel controllable variational autoencoder framework, ControlVAE, that combines a controller, inspired by automatic control theory, with the basic VAE to improve the performance of resulting generative models. Specifically, we design a new non-linear PI controller, a variant of the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control, to automatically tune the hyperparameter (weight) added in the VAE objective using the output KL-divergence as feedback during model training. The framework is evaluated using three applications; namely, language modeling, disentangled representation learning, and image generation. The results show that ControlVAE can achieve much better reconstruction quality than the competitive methods for the comparable disentanglement performance. For language modeling, it not only averts the KL-vanishing, but also improves the diversity of generated text. Finally, we also demonstrate that ControlVAE improves the reconstruction quality for image generation compared to the original VAE.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020
EditorsHal Daume, Aarti Singh
PublisherInternational Machine Learning Society (IMLS)
Pages8614-8623
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781713821120
StatePublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jul 13 2020Jul 18 2020

Publication series

Name37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020
VolumePartF168147-12

Conference

Conference37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period7/13/207/18/20

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Software

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'ControlVAE: Controllable variational autoencoder'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this