Unsupervised Learning of Equivariant Structure from SequencesDownload PDF

Published: 31 Oct 2022, Last Modified: 03 Jul 2024NeurIPS 2022 AcceptReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Disentanglement, Symmetry, Unsupervised Learning, Equivariance
Abstract: In this study, we present \textit{meta-sequential prediction} (MSP), an unsupervised framework to learn the symmetry from the time sequence of length at least three. Our method leverages the stationary property~(e.g. constant velocity, constant acceleration) of the time sequence to learn the underlying equivariant structure of the dataset by simply training the encoder-decoder model to be able to predict the future observations. We will demonstrate that, with our framework, the hidden disentangled structure of the dataset naturally emerges as a by-product by applying \textit{simultaneous block-diagonalization} to the transition operators in the latent space, the procedure which is commonly used in representation theory to decompose the feature-space based on the type of response to group actions. We will showcase our method from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Our result suggests that finding a simple structured relation and learning a model with extrapolation capability are two sides of the same coin. The code is available at https://github.com/takerum/meta_sequential_prediction.
TL;DR: We show that equivariance can be learned from a set of sequences with different but constant accelerations/velocities, and show that disentanglement emerges when we train the model to be able to linearly predict the future in the latent space.
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