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Research Area

Author

  • Yuhta Takida, Takashi Shibuya, Weihsiang Liao, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Junki Ohmura, Toshimitsu Uesaka, Naoki Murata, Shusuke Takahashi, Toshiyuki Kumakura, Yuki Mitsufuji
  • * External authors

Company

  • Sony Group Corporation

Venue

  • ICML

Date

  • 2022

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SQ-VAE: Variational Bayes on Discrete Representation with Self-annealed Stochastic Quantization

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Abstract

One noted issue of vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) is that the learned discrete representation uses only a fraction of the full capacity of the codebook, also known as codebook collapse. We hypothesize that the training scheme of VQ-VAE, which involves some carefully designed heuristics, underlies this issue. In this paper, we propose a new training scheme that extends the standard VAE via novel stochastic dequantization and quantization, called stochastically quantized variational autoencoder (SQ-VAE). In SQ-VAE, we observe a trend that the quantization is stochastic at the initial stage of the training but gradually converges toward a deterministic quantization, which we call self-annealing. Our experiments show that SQ-VAE improves codebook utilization without using common heuristics. Furthermore, we empirically show that SQ-VAE is superior to VAE and VQ-VAE in vision- and speech-related tasks.

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