Closed-Loop Unsupervised Representation Disentanglement with $\beta$-VAE Distillation and Diffusion Probabilistic Feedback
<|reference_start|>Closed-Loop Unsupervised Representation Disentanglement with $\beta$-VAE Distillation and Diffusion Probabilistic Feedback: Representation disentanglement may help AI fundamentally understand the real world and thus benefit both discrimination and generation tasks. It currently has at least three unresolved core issues: (i) heavy reliance on label annotation and synthetic data -- causing poor generalization on natural scenarios; (ii) heuristic/hand-craft disentangling constraints make it hard to adaptively achieve an optimal training trade-off; (iii) lacking reasonable evaluation metric, especially for the real label-free data. To address these challenges, we propose a \textbf{C}losed-\textbf{L}oop unsupervised representation \textbf{Dis}entanglement approach dubbed \textbf{CL-Dis}. Specifically, we use diffusion-based autoencoder (Diff-AE) as a backbone while resorting to $\beta$-VAE as a co-pilot to extract semantically disentangled representations. The strong generation ability of diffusion model and the good disentanglement ability of VAE model are complementary. To strengthen disentangling, VAE-latent distillation and diffusion-wise feedback are interconnected in a closed-loop system for a further mutual promotion. Then, a self-supervised \textbf{Navigation} strategy is introduced to identify interpretable semantic directions in the disentangled latent space. Finally, a new metric based on content tracking is designed to evaluate the disentanglement effect. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of CL-Dis on applications like real image manipulation and visual analysis.<|reference_end|>
@article{jin2024closed-loop,
    title={Closed-Loop Unsupervised Representation Disentanglement with $\beta$-VAE
  Distillation and Diffusion Probabilistic Feedback},
    author={Xin Jin, Bohan Li, BAAO Xie, Wenyao Zhang, Jinming Liu, Ziqiang Li,
  Tao Yang, Wenjun Zeng},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.02346},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2402.02346},
    primaryClass={cs.CV cs.LG}
}