Semi-supervised learning is sought for leveraging the unlabelled data when
labelled data is difficult or expensive to acquire. Deep generative models
(e.g., Variational Autoencoder (VAE)) and semisupervised Generative Adversarial
Networks (GANs) have recently shown promising performance in semi-supervised
classification for the excellent discriminative representing ability. However,
the latent code learned by the traditional VAE is not exclusive (repeatable)
for a specific input sample, which prevents it from excellent classification
performance. In particular, the learned latent representation depends on a
non-exclusive component which is stochastically sampled from the prior
distribution. Moreover, the semi-supervised GAN models generate data from
pre-defined distribution (e.g., Gaussian noises) which is independent of the
input data distribution and may obstruct the convergence and is difficult to
control the distribution of the generated data. To address the aforementioned
issues, we propose a novel Adversarial Variational Embedding (AVAE) framework
for robust and effective semi-supervised learning to leverage both the
advantage of GAN as a high quality generative model and VAE as a posterior
distribution learner. The proposed approach first produces an exclusive latent
code by the model which we call VAE++, and meanwhile, provides a meaningful
prior distribution for the generator of GAN. The proposed approach is evaluated
over four different real-world applications and we show that our method
outperforms the state-of-the-art models, which confirms that the combination of
VAE++ and GAN can provide significant improvements in semisupervised
classification.

我们提出了一种名为 AVAE 的新型对抗生成嵌入框架，该框架将 GAN 的高质量生成模型和 VAE 的后验分布学习器的优势相结合，用于半监督学习，并针对已有的问题进行改进。实践结果表明，我们的方法在半监督分类方面的表现优于现有的最先进模型。