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Title: Deep Variational Semi-Supervised Novelty Detection

Paper content:
In anomaly detection (AD), one seeks to identify whether a test sample is abnormal,  given a data set of normal samples.
A recent and promising approach to AD relies on deep generative models, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs),for unsupervised learning of the normal data distribution.
In semi-supervised AD (SSAD), the data also includes a small sample of labeled anomalies.
In this work,we propose two variational methods for training VAEs for SSAD.
The intuitive idea in both methods is to train the encoder to ‘separate’ between latent vectors for normal and outlier data.
We show that this idea can be derived from principled probabilistic formulations of the problem, and propose simple and effective algorithms.
Our methods can be applied to various data types, as we demonstrate on SSAD datasets ranging from natural images to astronomy and medicine, and can be combined with any VAE model architecture.
When comparing to state-of-the-art SSAD methods that are not specific to particular data types, we obtain marked improvement in outlier detection.
Anomaly detection (AD) -the task of identifying samples that are abnormal with respect to some normal data -has important applications in domains ranging from health-care, to security, and robotics (Pimentel et al., 2014) .
In its common formulation, training data is provided only for normal samples, while at test time, anomalous samples need to be detected.
In the probabilistic AD approach, a model of the normal data distribution is learned, and the likelihood of a test sample under this model is thresholded for classification as normal or not.
Recently, deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs, Kingma & Welling 2013) and generative adversarial networks (Goodfellow et al., 2014) have shown promise for learning data distributions in AD (An & Cho, 2015; Suh et al., 2016; Schlegl et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017) .
Here, we consider the setting of semi-supervised AD (SSAD), where in addition to the normal samples, a small sample of labeled anomalies is provided (Görnitz et al., 2013) .
Most importantly, this set is too small to represent the range of possible anomalies, making classification methods (either supervised or semi-supervised) unsuitable.
Instead, most approaches are based on 'fixing' an unsupervised AD method to correctly classify the labeled anomalies, while still maintaining AD capabilities for unseen outliers (e.g., Görnitz et al., 2013; Muñoz-Marí et al., 2010; Ruff et al., 2019) .
In this work, we present a variational approach for learning data distributions in the SSAD problem setting.
We base our method on the VAE, and modify the training objective to account for the labeled outlier data.
We propose two formulations for this problem.
The first maximizes the log-likelihood of normal samples, while minimizing the log-likelihood of outliers, and we effectively optimize this objective by combining the standard evidence lower bound (ELBO) with the χ upper bound (CUBO, Dieng et al. 2017) .
The second method is based on separating the VAE prior between normal and outlier samples.
Effectively, both methods have a similar intuitive interpretation: they modify the VAE encoder to push outlier samples away from the prior distribution (see Figure 1) .
Importantly, our method does not place any restriction on the VAE architecture, and can be used to modify any VAE to account for outliers.
As such, it can be used for general types of data.
We evaluate our methods in the comprehensive SSAD test-suite of Ruff et al. (2019) , which includes both image data and low-dimensional data sets from astronomy, medicine, and other domains, and report a marked improvement in performance compared to both shallow and deep methods.
In addition, we demonstrate the flexibility of our method by modifying a conditional VAE used for generating sampling distributions for robotic motion planning (Ichter et al., 2018) to not generate way points that collide with obstacles.
We proposed two VAE modifications that account for negative data examples, and used them for semi-supervised anomaly detection.
We showed that these methods can be derived from natural probabilistic formulations of the problem, and that the resulting algorithms are general and effective -they outperform the state-of-the-art on diverse datasets.
We further demonstrated that even a small fraction of outlier data can significantly improve anomaly detection on various datasets, and that our methods can be combined with VAE applications such as in motion planning.
We see great potential in the probabilistic approach to AD using deep generative models: it has a principled probabilistic interpretation, it is agnostic to the particular type of data, and it can be implemented using expressive generative models.
For specific data such as images, however, discriminative approaches that exploit domain specific methods such as geometric transformations are currently the best performers.
Developing similar self-supervised methods for generative approaches is an exciting direction for future research.
Another promising direction would be incorporating SSAD within energy-based models.
Rayana Shebuti.
Table 5 includes the complete results.
The results for an ensemble of Deep SAD models are in parenthesis (CIFAR-10).
The ensemble method is implemented the same way as ours: we train K = 5 separate models (i.e., each model has its own c), and the score (which is the distance from c) is the average of scores from all models in the ensemble.
A.1.2 CLASSIC ANOMALY DETECTION Table 6 includes the complete results.
MML-DP VAE combines both suggested objectives when training the VAE, i.e. MML and DP, and as reflected in the results, its performance is on par with them.

assistant: text: We proposed two VAE modifications that account for negative data examples, and used them for semi-supervised anomaly detection.