In this paper we propose a new method for regularizing autoencoders by imposing an arbitrary prior on the latent representation of the autoencoder. Our method, named "adversarial autoencoder", uses the recently proposed generative adversarial networks (GAN) in order to match the aggregated posterior of the hidden code vector of the autoencoder with an arbitrary prior. Matching the aggregated posterior to the prior ensures that there are no "holes" in the prior, and generating from any part of prior space results in meaningful samples. As a result, the decoder of the adversarial autoencoder learns a deep generative model that maps the imposed prior to the data distribution. We show how adversarial autoencoders can be used to disentangle style and content of images and achieve competitive generative performance on MNIST, Street View House Numbers and Toronto Face datasets.

本文提出了“对抗自编码器”(AAE)，它是一个概率自编码器，使用最近提出的生成对抗网络(GAN)通过匹配自编码器的隐藏代码向量的聚合后验分布与任意先验分布来执行变分推断。匹配聚合后验分布和先验保证从先验空间的任何部分生成都会产生有意义的样本。结果，对抗自编码器的解码器学习了一种深度生成模型，将所施加的先验映射到数据分布。我们展示了对抗自编码器如何在半监督分类，图像风格和内容分离，无监督聚类，降维和数据可视化等应用中使用。我们在MNIST、Street View房屋号码和Toronto Face数据集上进行了实验，并展示了对抗性自编码器在生成建模和半监督分类任务中取得了有竞争力的结果。