Publication
Sum-Product Autoencoding: Encoding and Decoding Representations Using Sum-Product Networks
Antonio Vergari; Robert Peharz; Nicola Di Mauro; Alejandro Molina; Kristian Kersting; Floriana Esposito
In: Sheila A. McIlraith; Kilian Q. Weinberger (Hrsg.). Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18), Pages 4163-4170, AAAI Press, 2018.
Abstract
Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) are a deep probabilistic architecture that up to now has been successfully employed for tractable inference. Here, we extend their scope towards unsupervised representation learning: we encode samples into continuous and categorical embeddings and show that they can also be decoded back into the original input space by leveraging MPE inference. We characterize when this Sum-Product Autoencoding (SPAE) leads to equivalent reconstructions and extend it towards dealing with missing embedding information. Our experimental results on several multi-label classification problems demonstrate that SPAE is competitive with state-of-the-art autoencoder architectures, even if the SPNs were never trained to reconstruct their inputs.