Unsupervised and interpretable scene discovery with Discrete-Attend-Infer-Repeat

Abstract

In this work we present Discrete Attend Infer Repeat (Discrete-AIR), a Recurrent Auto-Encoder with structured latent distributions containing discrete categorical distributions, continuous attribute distributions, and factorised spatial attention. While inspired by the original AIR model andretaining AIR model's capability in identifying objects in an image, Discrete-AIR provides direct interpretability of the latent codes. We show that for Multi-MNIST and a multiple-objects version of dSprites dataset, the Discrete-AIR model needs just one categorical latent variable, one attribute variable (for Multi-MNIST only), together with spatial attention variables, for efficient inference. We perform analysis to show that the learnt categorical distributions effectively capture the categories of objects in the scene for Multi-MNIST and for Multi-Sprites.