In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.

Ex Input:
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.

Ex Output:
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.

Ex Input:
Deep generative models can emulate the perceptual properties of complex image datasets, providing a latent representation of the data. However, manipulating such representation to perform meaningful and controllable transformations in the data space remains challenging without some form of supervision. While previous work has focused on exploiting statistical independence to extit{disentangle} latent factors, we argue that such requirement can be advantageously relaxed and propose instead a non-statistical framework that relies on identifying a modular organization of the network, based on counterfactual manipulations. Our experiments support that modularity between groups of channels is achieved to a certain degree on a variety of generative models. This allowed the design of targeted interventions on complex image datasets, opening the way to applications such as computationally efficient style transfer and the automated assessment of robustness to contextual changes in pattern recognition systems.

Ex Output:
We develop a framework to find modular internal representations in generative models and manipulate then to generate counterfactual examples.

Ex Input:
Deep representation learning has become one of the most widely adopted approaches for visual search, recommendation, and identification. Retrieval of such representations from a large database is however computationally challenging. Approximate methods based on learning compact representations, have been widely explored for this problem, such as locality sensitive hashing, product quantization, and PCA. In this work, in contrast to learning compact representations, we propose to learn high dimensional and sparse representations that have similar representational capacity as dense embeddings while being more efficient due to sparse matrix multiplication operations which can be much faster than dense multiplication. Following the key insight that the number of operations decreases quadratically with the sparsity of embeddings provided the non-zero entries are distributed uniformly across dimensions, we propose a novel approach to learn such distributed sparse embeddings via the use of a carefully constructed regularization function that directly minimizes a continuous relaxation of the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) incurred during retrieval. Our experiments show that our approach is competitive to the other baselines and yields a similar or better speed-vs-accuracy tradeoff on practical datasets.

Ex Output:
We propose an approach to learn sparse high dimensional representations that are fast to search, by incorporating a surrogate of the number of operations directly into the loss function.