English

SHOT-VAE: Semi-supervised Deep Generative Models With Label-aware ELBO Approximations

Machine Learning 2020-12-09 v4

Abstract

Semi-supervised variational autoencoders (VAEs) have obtained strong results, but have also encountered the challenge that good ELBO values do not always imply accurate inference results. In this paper, we investigate and propose two causes of this problem: (1) The ELBO objective cannot utilize the label information directly. (2) A bottleneck value exists and continuing to optimize ELBO after this value will not improve inference accuracy. On the basis of the experiment results, we propose SHOT-VAE to address these problems without introducing additional prior knowledge. The SHOT-VAE offers two contributions: (1) A new ELBO approximation named smooth-ELBO that integrates the label predictive loss into ELBO. (2) An approximation based on optimal interpolation that breaks the ELBO value bottleneck by reducing the margin between ELBO and the data likelihood. The SHOT-VAE achieves good performance with a 25.30% error rate on CIFAR-100 with 10k labels and reduces the error rate to 6.11% on CIFAR-10 with 4k labels.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.10684,
  title  = {SHOT-VAE: Semi-supervised Deep Generative Models With Label-aware ELBO Approximations},
  author = {Hao-Zhe Feng and Kezhi Kong and Minghao Chen and Tianye Zhang and Minfeng Zhu and Wei Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.10684},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

12 pages, 6 figures, Accepted for presentation at AAAI2021

R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:24:31.970Z