The recently developed variational autoencoders (VAEs) have proved to be an
effective confluence of the rich representational power of neural networks with
Bayesian methods. However, most work on VAEs use a rather simple prior over the
latent variables such as standard normal distribution, thereby restricting its
applications to relatively simple phenomena. In this work, we propose
hierarchical nonparametric variational autoencoders, which combines
tree-structured Bayesian nonparametric priors with VAEs, to enable infinite
flexibility of the latent representation space. Both the neural parameters and
Bayesian priors are learned jointly using tailored variational inference. The
resulting model induces a hierarchical structure of latent semantic concepts
underlying the data corpus, and infers accurate representations of data
instances. We apply our model in video representation learning. Our method is
able to discover highly interpretable activity hierarchies, and obtain improved
clustering accuracy and generalization capacity based on the learned rich
representations.

本文提出了一种层次非参数变分自编码器模型，以结合树状结构的贝叶斯非参数先验和变分自编码器来实现无限灵活性的潜在表征空间，进而在视频表征学习上取得更好的效果。