Set Distribution Networks: a Generative Model for Sets of Images (Paper Explained)

We've become very good at making generative models for images and classes of images, but not yet of sets of images, especially when the number of sets is unknown and can contain sets that have never been encountered during training. This paper builds a probabilistic framework and a practical implementation of a generative model for sets of images based on variational methods.

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Intro & Overview
1:25 - Problem Statement
8:05 - Architecture Overview
20:05 - Probabilistic Model
33:50 - Likelihood Function
40:30 - Model Architectures
44:20 - Loss Function & Optimization
47:30 - Results
58:45 - Conclusion

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10705

Abstract:
Images with shared characteristics naturally form sets. For example, in a face verification benchmark, images of the same identity form sets. For generative models, the standard way of dealing with sets is to represent each as a one hot vector, and learn a conditional generative model p(x|y). This representation assumes that the number of sets is limited and known, such that the distribution over sets reduces to a simple multinomial distribution. In contrast, we study a more generic problem where the number of sets is large and unknown. We introduce Set Distribution Networks (SDNs), a novel framework that learns to autoencode and freely generate sets. We achieve this by jointly learning a set encoder, set discriminator, set generator, and set prior. We show that SDNs are able to reconstruct image sets that preserve salient attributes of the inputs in our benchmark datasets, and are also able to generate novel objects/identities. We examine the sets generated by SDN with a pre-trained 3D reconstruction network and a face verification network, respectively, as a novel way to evaluate the quality of generated sets of images.

Authors: Shuangfei Zhai, Walter Talbott, Miguel Angel Bautista, Carlos Guestrin, Josh M. Susskind

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