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.

Recently, neural networks purely based on attention were shown to address image understanding tasks such as image classification. These high-performing vision transformers are pre-trained with hundreds of millions of images using a large infrastructure, thereby limiting their adoption.

In this work, we produce competitive convolution-free transformers trained on ImageNet only using a single computer in less than 3 days. Our reference vision transformer (86M parameters) achieves top-1 accuracy of 83.1% (single-crop) on ImageNet with no external data.

We also introduce a teacher-student strategy specific to transformers. It relies on a distillation token ensuring that the student learns from the teacher through attention, typically from a convnet teacher. The learned transformers are competitive (85.2% top-1 acc.) with the state of the art on ImageNet, and similarly when transferred to other tasks. We will share our code and models.

Sketch drawings capture the salient information of visual concepts. Previous work has shown that neural networks are capable of producing sketches of natural objects drawn from a small number of classes. While earlier approaches focus on generation quality or retrieval, we explore properties of image representations learned by training a model to produce sketches of images. We show that this generative, class-agnostic model produces informative embeddings of images from novel examples, classes, and even novel datasets in a few-shot setting. Additionally, we find that these learned representations exhibit interesting structure and compositionality.

Evaluating the quality of learned representations without relying on a downstream task remains one of the challenges in representation learning. In this work, we present Geometric Component Analysis (GeomCA) algorithm that evaluates representation spaces based on their geometric and topological properties. GeomCA can be applied to representations of any dimension, independently of the model that generated them. We demonstrate its applicability by analyzing representations obtained from a variety of scenarios, such as contrastive learning models, generative models and supervised learning models.

We study neural-linear bandits for solving problems where {\em both} exploration and representation learning play an important role. Neural-linear bandits harnesses the representation power of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and combines it with efficient exploration mechanisms by leveraging uncertainty estimation of the model, designed for linear contextual bandits on top of the last hidden layer. In order to mitigate the problem of representation change during the process, new uncertainty estimations are computed using stored data from an unlimited buffer. Nevertheless, when the amount of stored data is limited, a phenomenon called catastrophic forgetting emerges. To alleviate this, we propose a likelihood matching algorithm that is resilient to catastrophic forgetting and is completely online. We applied our algorithm, Limited Memory Neural-Linear with Likelihood Matching (NeuralLinear-LiM2) on a variety of datasets and observed that our algorithm achieves comparable performance to the unlimited memory approach while exhibits resilience to catastrophic forgetting.

Learning models that gracefully handle distribution shifts is central to research on domain generalization, robust optimization, and fairness. A promising formulation is domain-invariant learning, which identifies the key issue of learning which features are domain-specific versus domain-invariant. An important assumption in this area is that the training examples are partitioned into domains'' orenvironments''. Our focus is on the more common setting where such partitions are not provided. We propose EIIL, a general framework for domain-invariant learning that incorporates Environment Inference to directly infer partitions that are maximally informative for downstream Invariant Learning. We show that EIIL outperforms invariant learning methods on the CMNIST benchmark without using environment labels, and significantly outperforms ERM on worst-group performance in the Waterbirds dataset. Finally, we establish connections between EIIL and algorithmic fairness, which enables EIIL to improve accuracy and calibration in a fair prediction problem.

Recently, neural implicit functions have achieved impressive results for encoding 3D shapes. Conditioning on low-dimensional latent codes generalises a single implicit function to learn shared representation space for a variety of shapes, with the advantage of smooth interpolation. While the benefits from the global latent space do not correspond to explicit points at local level, we propose to track the continuous point trajectory by matching implicit features with the latent code interpolating between shapes, from which we corroborate the hierarchical functionality of the deep implicit functions, where early layers map the latent code to fitting the coarse shape structure, and deeper layers further refine the shape details. Furthermore, the structured representation space of implicit functions enables to apply feature matching for shape deformation, with the benefits to handle topology and semantics inconsistency, such as from an armchair to a chair with no arms, without explicit flow functions or manual annotations.