Conditional generation of multi-modal data using constrained embedding space mapping

Abstract: We present a conditional generative model that maps low-dimensional embeddings of multiple modalities of data to a common latent space hence extracting semantic relationships between them. The embedding specific to a modality is first extracted and subsequently a constrained optimization procedure is performed to project the two embedding spaces to a common manifold. The individual embeddings are generated back from this common latent space. However, in order to enable independent conditional inference for separately extracting the corresponding embeddings from the common latent space representation, we deploy a proxy variable trick - wherein, the single shared latent space is replaced by the respective separate latent spaces of each modality. We design an objective function, such that, during training we can force these separate spaces to lie close to each other, by minimizing the distance between their probability distribution functions. Experimental results demonstrate that the learned joint model can generalize to learning concepts of double MNIST digits with additional attributes of colors,from both textual and speech input.