Learning Structured Output Representation using Deep Conditional Generative Models

Kihyuk Sohn, Honglak Lee, Xinchen Yan

Abstract: Supervised deep learning has been successfully applied for many recognition problems in machine learning and computer vision. Although it can approximate a complex many-to-one function very well when large number of training data is provided, the lack of probabilistic inference of the current supervised deep learning methods makes it difficult to model a complex structured output representations. In this work, we develop a scalable deep conditional generative model for structured output variables using Gaussian latent variables. The model is trained efficiently in the framework of stochastic gradient variational Bayes, and allows a fast prediction using stochastic feed-forward inference. In addition, we provide novel strategies to build a robust structured prediction algorithms, such as recurrent prediction network architecture, input noise-injection and multi-scale prediction training methods. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in comparison to the deterministic deep neural network counterparts in generating diverse but realistic output representations using stochastic inference. Furthermore, the proposed schemes in training methods and architecture design were complimentary, which leads to achieve strong pixel-level object segmentation and semantic labeling performance on Caltech-UCSD Birds 200 and the subset of Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset.