Improving representation learning in autoencoders via multidimensional interpolation and dual regularizations

Abstract

Autoencoders enjoy a remarkable ability to learn data representations. Research on autoencoders shows that the effectiveness of data interpolation can reflect the performance of representation learning. However, existing interpolation methods in autoencoders do not have enough capability of traversing a possible region between two datapoints on a data manifold, and the distribution of interpolated latent representations is not considered.To address these issues, we aim to fully exert the potential of data interpolation and further improve representation learning in autoencoders. Specifically, we propose the multidimensional interpolation to increase the capability of data interpolation by randomly setting interpolation coefficients for each dimension of latent representations. In addition, we regularize autoencoders in both the latent and the data spaces by imposing a prior on latent representations in the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) framework and encouraging generated datapoints to be realistic in the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework. Compared to representative models, our proposed model has empirically shown that representation learning exhibits better performance on downstream tasks on multiple benchmarks.