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Learning about an exponential amount of conditional distributions

Machine Learning 2019-02-25 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We introduce the Neural Conditioner (NC), a self-supervised machine able to learn about all the conditional distributions of a random vector XX. The NC is a function NC(xa,a,r)NC(x \cdot a, a, r) that leverages adversarial training to match each conditional distribution P(XrXa=xa)P(X_r|X_a=x_a). After training, the NC generalizes to sample from conditional distributions never seen, including the joint distribution. The NC is also able to auto-encode examples, providing data representations useful for downstream classification tasks. In sum, the NC integrates different self-supervised tasks (each being the estimation of a conditional distribution) and levels of supervision (partially observed data) seamlessly into a single learning experience.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.08401,
  title  = {Learning about an exponential amount of conditional distributions},
  author = {Mohamed Ishmael Belghazi and Maxime Oquab and Yann LeCun and David Lopez-Paz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.08401},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:47:59.454Z