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Title: Latent Domain Transfer: Crossing modalities with Bridging Autoencoders

Paper content:
Domain transfer is a exciting and challenging branch of machine learning because models must learn to smoothly transfer between domains, preserving local variations and capturing many aspects of variation without labels.
However, most successful applications to date require the two domains to be closely related (ex. image-to-image, video-video),
utilizing similar or shared networks to transform domain specific properties like texture, coloring, and line shapes.
Here, we demonstrate that it is possible to transfer across modalities (ex. image-to-audio) by first abstracting the data with latent generative models and then learning transformations between latent spaces.
We find that a simple variational autoencoder is able to learn a shared latent space to bridge between two generative models in an unsupervised fashion, and even between different types of models (ex. variational autoencoder and a generative adversarial network).
We can further impose desired semantic alignment of attributes with a linear classifier in the shared latent space.
The proposed variation autoencoder enables preserving both locality and semantic alignment through the transfer process, as shown in the qualitative and quantitative evaluations.
Finally, the hierarchical structure decouples the cost of training the base generative models and semantic alignments, enabling computationally efficient and data efficient retraining of personalized mapping functions.
Domain transfer has long captured the imagination of inventors and artists alike.
The early precursor of the phonograph, the phonautograph, was actually inspired by the idea of "words which write themselves", where the shape of audio waveforms would transform into the shape of writing, capturing the content and character of the speaker's voice in shape and stroke of the written characters BID9 .
While perhaps fanciful at the time, modern deep learning techniques have shown similar complex transformations are indeed possible.Deep learning enables domain transfer by learning a smooth mapping between two domains such that the variations in one domain are reflected in the other.
This has been demonstrated to great effect within a data modality, for example transferring between two different styles of image BID12 BID18 , video BID26 and music BID23 .
The works have been the basis of interesting creative tools, as small intuitive changes in the source domain are reflected by small intuitive changes in the target domain.
Furthermore, the strong conditioning signal of the source domain makes learning transformations easier than learning a full generative model in each domain.Despite these successes, this line of work in domain transfer has several limitations.
The first limitation is that it requires that two domains should be closely related (e.g. image-to-image or videoto-video) .
This allows the model to focus on transferring local properties like texture and coloring instead of high-level semantics.
For example, directly applying these image-to-image transfer such as CycleGAN or its variants to images from distant domains leads to distorted and unrealistic results .
This agrees with the findings of BID3 who show that CycleGAN transformations are more akin to adversarial examples than style transfer, as the model Our method aims at transfer from one domain to another domain such that the correct semantics (e.g., label) is maintained across domains and local changes in the source domain should be reflected in the target domain.
To achieve this, we train a model to transfer between the latent spaces of pre-trained generative models on source and target domains.
(a) The training is done with three types of loss functions: (1) The VAE ELBO losses to encourage modeling of z 1 and z 2 , which are denoted as L2 and KL in the figure.
(2) The Sliced Wasserstein Distance loss to encourage cross-domain overlapping in the shared latent space, which is denoted as SWD.
(3) The classification loss to encourage intra-class overlap in the shared latent space, which is denoted as Classifier.
The training is semi-supervised, since (1) and (2) requires no supervision (classes) while only (3) needs such information.
(b) To transfer data from one domain x 1 (an image of digit "0") to another domain x 2 (an audio of human saying "zero", shown in form of spectrum in the example), we first encode x 1 to z 1 ∼ q(z 1 |x 1 ), which we then further encode to a shared latent vector z using our conditional encoder, z ∼ q(z |z 1 , D = 1), where D donates the operating domain.
We then decode to the latent space of the target domain z 2 = g(z|z , D = 2) using our conditional decoder, which finally is used to generate the transferred audio x 2 = g(x 2 |z 2 ).learns
to hide information about the source domain in near-imperceptible high-frequency variations of the target domain.The second limitation is data efficiency. Most conditional
GAN techniques, such as Pix2Pix BID12 and vid2vid BID26 , require very dense supervision from large volumes of paired data. This is usually
accomplished by extracting features, such as edges or a segmentation map, and then training the conditional GAN to learn the inverse mapping back to pixels. For many more interesting
transformations, no such easy alignment procedure exists, and paired data is scarce. We demonstrate the limitation
of existing approaches in Appendix C.For multi-modal domain transfer, we seek to train a model capable of transferring instances from a source domain (x 1 ) to a target domain (x 2 ), such that local variations in source domain are transferred to local variations in the target domain. We refer to this property as
locality. Thus, local interpolation in
the source domain would ideally be similar to local interpolation in target domain when transferred.There are many possible ways that two domains could align such that they maintain locality, with many different alignments of semantic attributes. For instance, for a limited
dataset, there is no a priori reason that images of the digit "0" and spoken utterances of the digit "0" would align with each other. Or more abstractly, there may
be no agreed common semantics for images of landscapes and passages of music, and it is at the liberty of the user to define such connections based on their own intent. Our goal in modeling is to respect
the user's intent and make sure that the correct semantics (e.g., labels) are shared between the two domains after transfer. We refer to this property as semantic
alignment. A user can thus sort a set of data points
from in each domain into common bins, which we can use to constrain the cross-domain alignment. We can quantitatively measure the degree
of semantic alignment by using a classifier to label transformed data and measuring the percentage of data points that fall into the same bin for the source and target domain. Our goal can thus be stated as learning
transformations that preserve locality and semantic alignment, while requiring as few labels from a user as possible.To achieve this goal and tackle prior limitations, we propose to abstract the domain domains with independent latent variable models, and then learn to transfer between the latent spaces of those models. Our main contributions include:• We propose
a shared "bridging" VAE to transfer between latent generative models. Locality and semantic alignment of transformations
are encouraged by applying a sliced-wasserstein distance, and a classification loss respectively to the shared latent space.• We demonstrate with qualitative and quantitative
results that our proposed method enables transfer both within a modality (image-to-image) and between modalities (image-to-audio).• Since we training a smaller secondary model in latent
space, we find improvements in training efficiency, measured by both in terms of the amount of required labeled data and well training time.
We have demonstrated an approach to learn mappings between disparate domains by bridging the latent codes of each domain with a shared autoencoder.
We find bridging VAEs are able to achieve high transfer accuracies, smoothly map interpolations between domains, and even connect different model types (VAEs and GANs).
Here, we have restricted ourselves to datasets with intuitive classlevel mappings for the purpose of quantitative comparisons, however, there are many interesting creative possibilities to apply these techniques between domains without a clear semantic alignment.
As a semi-supervised technique, we have shown bridging autoencoders to require less supervised labels, making it more feasible to learn personalized cross-modal domain transfer based on the creative guidance of individual users.

assistant: text: Conditional VAE on top of latent spaces of pre-trained generative models that enables  transfer between drastically different domains while preserving locality and semantic alignment.