One of the pursued objectives of deep learning is to provide tools that learn abstract representations of reality from the observation of multiple contextual situations. More precisely, one wishes to extract disentangled representations which are (i) low dimensional and (ii) whose components are independent and correspond to concepts capturing the essence of the objects under consideration (Locatello et al., 2019b). One step towards this ambitious project consists in learning disentangled representations with respect to a predefined (sensitive) attribute, e.g., the gender or age of the writer. Perhaps one of the main application for such disentangled representations is fair classification. Existing methods extract the last layer of a neural network trained with a loss that is composed of a cross-entropy objective and a disentanglement regularizer. In this work, we adopt an information-theoretic view of this problem which motivates a novel family of regularizers that minimizes the mutual information between the latent representation and the sensitive attribute conditional to the target. The resulting set of losses, called CLINIC, is parameter free and thus, it is easier and faster to train. CLINIC losses are studied through extensive numerical experiments by training over 2k neural networks. We demonstrate that our methods offer a better disentanglement/accuracy trade-off than previous techniques, and generalize better than training with cross-entropy loss solely provided that the disentanglement task is not too constraining.

从多种上下文环境的观察中提取现实的抽象表示是深度学习的一个追求目标之一。本文采用信息论的视角来研究这个问题，提出了一种新颖的正则化方法，称为CLINIC损失，通过大量的数值实验证明了这种方法在解缠表征与准确性之间取得更好的平衡，并且在不过于限制解缠任务的情况下具有更好的普适性。

用一种新颖的信息论目标分解表示以实现公平分类