Joint Multimodal Learning with Deep Generative Models

Masahiro Suzuki, Kotaro Nakayama, Yutaka Matsuo

Abstract: We investigate deep generative models that can exchange multiple modalities bi-directionally, e.g., generating images from corresponding texts and vice versa. Recently, some studies handle multiple modalities on deep generative models. However, these models typically assume that modalities are forced to have a conditioned relation, i.e., we can only generate modalities in one direction. To achieve our objective, we should extract a joint representation that captures high-level concepts among all modalities and through which we can exchange them bi-directionally. As described herein, we propose a joint multimodal variational autoencoder (JMVAE), in which all modalities are independently conditioned on joint representation. In other words, it models a joint distribution of modalities. Furthermore, to be able to generate missing modalities from the remaining modalities properly, we develop an additional method, JMVAE-kl, that is trained by reducing the divergence between JMVAE's encoder and prepared networks of respective modalities. Our experiments show that JMVAE can generate multiple modalities bi-directionally.

Conflicts: u-tokyo.ac.jp