No Representation without Transformation

Abstract: We extend the framework of variational autoencoders to represent transformations explicitly in the latent space. In the family of hierarchical graphical models that emerges, the latent space is populated by higher order objects that are inferred jointly with the latent representations they act on. To explicitly demonstrate the effect of these higher order objects, we show that the inferred latent transformations reflect interpretable properties in the observation space. Furthermore, the model is structured in such a way that in the absence of transformations, we can run inference and obtain generative capabilities comparable with standard variational autoencoders. Finally, utilizing the trained encoder, we outperform the baselines by a wide margin on a challenging out-of-distribution classification task.