Deep generative models (DGMs) are effective on learning multilayered representations of complex data and performing inference of input data by exploring the generative ability. However, it is relatively insufficient to empower the discriminative ability of DGMs on making accurate predictions. This paper presents max-margin deep generative models (mmDGMs) and a class-conditional variant (mmDCGMs), which explore the strongly discriminative principle of max-margin learning to improve the predictive performance of DGMs in both supervised and semi-supervised learning, while retaining the generative capability. In semi-supervised learning, we use the predictions of a max-margin classifier as the missing labels instead of performing full posterior inference for efficiency; we also introduce additional max-margin and label-balance regularization terms of unlabeled data for effectiveness. We develop an efficient doubly stochastic subgradient algorithm for the piecewise linear objectives in different settings. Empirical results on various datasets demonstrate that: (1) max-margin learning can significantly improve the prediction performance of DGMs and meanwhile retain the generative ability; (2) in supervised learning, mmDGMs are competitive to the best fully discriminative networks when employing convolutional neural networks as the generative and recognition models; and (3) in semi-supervised learning, mmDCGMs can perform efficient inference and achieve state-of-the-art classification results on several benchmarks.

本文介绍了一种新的深度生成模型 (DGMs) - max-margin deep generative models (mmDGMs) 和 class-conditional variant (mmDCGMs)，它们同时保留了生成性和判别性，通过最大间隔学习来提高模型的预测性能，并且在半监督学习中利用了最大间隔分类器来代替全局后验推断从而提高学习效率。在各种数据集上的实验结果表明，这种方法可以明显地提高模型的预测性能。

（半监督）最大化边缘深度生成模型用于学习