Many popular representation-learning algorithms use training objectives defined on the observed data space, which we call pixel-level. This may be detrimental when only a small fraction of the bits of signal actually matter at a semantic level. We hypothesize that representations should be learned and evaluated more directly in terms of their information content and statistical or structural constraints. To address the first quality, we consider learning unsupervised representations by maximizing mutual information between part or all of the input and a high-level feature vector. To address the second, we control characteristics of the representation by matching to a prior adversarially. Our method, which we call Deep INFOMAX (DIM), can be used to learn representations with desired characteristics and which empirically outperform a number of popular unsupervised learning methods on classification tasks. DIM opens new avenues for unsupervised learn-ing of representations and is an important step towards flexible formulations of representation learning objectives catered towards specific end-goals.

通过在深度神经网络编码器的输入和输出之间最大化互信息来进行无监督学习表示，该方法将表示的特征与先前分布进行敌对匹配，优于其他无监督学习方法并能够在多个分类任务中与全监督学习相竞争，深度信息最大化（DIM）为特定端点目标的无监督学习表示开启了新的途径。

通过互信息估计和最大化学习深层表示