We propose an approach to learn image representations that consist of
disentangled factors of variation without exploiting any manual labeling or
data domain knowledge. A factor of variation corresponds to an image attribute
that can be discerned consistently across a set of images, such as the pose or
color of objects. Our disentangled representation consists of a concatenation
of feature chunks, each chunk representing a factor of variation. It supports
applications such as transferring attributes from one image to another, by
simply mixing and unmixing feature chunks, and classification or retrieval
based on one or several attributes, by considering a user-specified subset of
feature chunks. We learn our representation without any labeling or knowledge
of the data domain, using an autoencoder architecture with two novel training
objectives: first, we propose an invariance objective to encourage that
encoding of each attribute, and decoding of each chunk, are invariant to
changes in other attributes and chunks, respectively; second, we include a
classification objective, which ensures that each chunk corresponds to a
consistently discernible attribute in the represented image, hence avoiding
degenerate feature mappings where some chunks are completely ignored. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the MNIST, Sprites, and CelebA
datasets.

本文提出了一种不依赖于手动标注或数据领域知识的学习图像表示的方法，其实现了图像属性解离因素，其中每个因素代表一个一致的图像属性，这种解离后的特征可以应用于多种领域，例如将特定属性从一个图像转移到另一个图像、基于一个或多个属性进行分类或检索。这种方法中的自动编码器架构包括两个新的训练目标：不变性目标和分类目标，以确保每个特征块的编码对于其他属性是固定不变的，同时对于一致可辨的属性，避免出现完全被忽略的特征映射。实验验证了该方法在 MNIST、Sprites 和 CelebA 数据集上的有效性。