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Oral
On Disentangled Representations Learned from Correlated Data
Frederik Träuble · Elliot Creager · Niki Kilbertus · Francesco Locatello · Andrea Dittadi · Anirudh Goyal · Bernhard Schölkopf · Stefan Bauer

Thu Jul 22 07:00 AM -- 07:20 AM (PDT) @

The focus of disentanglement approaches has been on identifying independent factors of variation in data. However, the causal variables underlying real-world observations are often not statistically independent. In this work, we bridge the gap to real-world scenarios by analyzing the behavior of the most prominent disentanglement approaches on correlated data in a large-scale empirical study (including 4260 models). We show and quantify that systematically induced correlations in the dataset are being learned and reflected in the latent representations, which has implications for downstream applications of disentanglement such as fairness. We also demonstrate how to resolve these latent correlations, either using weak supervision during training or by post-hoc correcting a pre-trained model with a small number of labels.

Author Information

Frederik Träuble (MPI for Intelligent Systems)
Elliot Creager (University of Toronto)
Niki Kilbertus (Helmholtz AI)
Francesco Locatello (Amazon)
Andrea Dittadi (Technical University of Denmark)
Anirudh Goyal (Université de Montréal)
Bernhard Schölkopf (MPI for Intelligent Systems Tübingen, Germany)

Bernhard Scholkopf received degrees in mathematics (London) and physics (Tubingen), and a doctorate in computer science from the Technical University Berlin. He has researched at AT&T Bell Labs, at GMD FIRST, Berlin, at the Australian National University, Canberra, and at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK). In 2001, he was appointed scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics; in 2010 he founded the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. For further information, see www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/~bs.

Stefan Bauer (MPI for Intelligent Systems)

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