Learning to Drop Out: An Adversarial Approach to Training Sequence VAEsDownload PDF

Published: 31 Oct 2022, Last Modified: 16 Dec 2022NeurIPS 2022 AcceptReaders: Everyone
Keywords: VAE, dropout, posterior collapse
TL;DR: We propose an adversarial training strategy to achieve information-based stochastic dropout.
Abstract: In principle, applying variational autoencoders (VAEs) to sequential data offers a method for controlled sequence generation, manipulation, and structured representation learning. However, training sequence VAEs is challenging: autoregressive decoders can often explain the data without utilizing the latent space, known as posterior collapse. To mitigate this, state-of-the-art models `weaken' the `powerful decoder' by applying uniformly random dropout to the decoder input. We show theoretically that this removes pointwise mutual information provided by the decoder input, which is compensated for by utilizing the latent space. We then propose an adversarial training strategy to achieve information-based stochastic dropout. Compared to uniform dropout on standard text benchmark datasets, our targeted approach increases both sequence modeling performance and the information captured in the latent space.
Supplementary Material: pdf
23 Replies

Loading