Rethinking Semi-Supervised Learning in VAEs

We present an alternative approach to semi-supervision in variational autoencoders(VAEs) that incorporates labels through auxiliary variables rather than directly through the latent variables. Prior work has generally conflated the meaning of labels, i.e. the associated characteristics of interest, with the actual label values themselves-learning latent variables that directly correspond to the label values. We argue that to learn meaningful representations, semi-supervision should instead try to capture these richer characteristics and that the construction of latent variables as label values is not just unnecessary, but actively harmful. To this end, we develop a novel VAE model, the reparameterized VAE (ReVAE), which "reparameterizes" supervision through auxiliary variables and a concomitant variational objective. Through judicious structuring of mappings between latent and auxiliary variables, we show that the ReVAE can effectively learn meaningful representations of data. In particular, we demonstrate that the ReVAE is able to match, and even improve on the classification accuracy of previous approaches, but more importantly, it also allows for more effective and more general interventions to be performed. We include a demo of ReVAE at this https URL.