TR2020-093

Representation Learning via Adversarially-Contrastive Optimal Transport


    •  Cherian, A., Aeron, S., "Representation Learning via Adversarially-Contrastive Optimal Transport", International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Daumé, H. and Singh, A., Eds., July 2020, pp. 10675-10685.
      BibTeX TR2020-093 PDF Software
      • @inproceedings{Cherian2020jul,
      • author = {Cherian, Anoop and Aeron, Shuchin},
      • title = {Representation Learning via Adversarially-Contrastive Optimal Transport},
      • booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
      • year = 2020,
      • editor = {Daumé, H. and Singh, A.},
      • pages = {10675--10685},
      • month = jul,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2020-093}
      • }
  • MERL Contact:
  • Research Areas:

    Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning

Abstract:

In this paper, we study the problem of learning compact (low-dimensional) representations for sequential data that captures its implicit spatiotemporal cues. To maximize extraction of such informative cues from the data, we set the problem within the context of contrastive representation learning and to that end propose a novel objective via optimal transport. Specifically, our formulation seeks a low-dimensional subspace representation of the data that jointly (i) maximizes the distance of the data (embedded in this subspace) from an adversarial data distribution under the optimal transport, a.k.a. the Wasserstein distance, (ii) captures the temporal order, and (iii) minimizes the data distortion. To generate the adversarial distribution, we propose a novel framework connecting Wasserstein GANs with a classifier, allowing a principled mechanism for producing good negative distributions for contrastive learning, which is currently a challenging problem. Our full objective is cast as a subspace learning problem on the Grassmann manifold and solved via Riemannian optimization. To empirically study our formulation, we provide experiments on the task of human action recognition in video sequences. Our results demonstrate competitive performance against challenging baselines.

 

  • Software & Data Downloads

  • Related News & Events

  • Related Research Highlights