In this work, we perform unsupervised learning of representations by
maximizing mutual information between an input and the output of a deep neural
network encoder. Importantly, we show that structure matters: incorporating
knowledge about locality of the input to the objective can greatly influence a
representation's suitability for downstream tasks. We further control
characteristics of the representation by matching to a prior distribution
adversarially. Our method, which we call Deep InfoMax (DIM), outperforms a
number of popular unsupervised learning methods and competes with
fully-supervised learning on several classification tasks. DIM opens new
avenues for unsupervised learning of representations and is an important step
towards flexible formulations of representation-learning objectives for
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。