GAN-EM: GAN Based EM Learning Framework

GAN-EM: GAN Based EM Learning Framework

Wentian Zhao, Shaojie Wang, Zhihuai Xie, Jing Shi, Chenliang Xu

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4404-4411. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/612

Expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is to find maximum likelihood solution for models having latent variables. A typical example is Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) which requires Gaussian assumption, however, natural images are highly non-Gaussian so that GMM cannot be applied to perform image clustering task on pixel space. To overcome such limitation, we propose a GAN based EM learning framework that can maximize the likelihood of images and estimate the latent variables. We call this model GAN-EM, which is a framework for image clustering, semi-supervised classification and dimensionality reduction. In M-step, we design a novel loss function for discriminator of GAN to perform maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) on data with soft class label assignments. Specifically, a conditional generator captures data distribution for K classes, and a discriminator tells whether a sample is real or fake for each class. Since our model is unsupervised, the class label of real data is regarded as latent variable, which is estimated by an additional network (E-net) in E-step. The proposed GAN-EM achieves state-of-the-art clustering and semi-supervised classification results on MNIST, SVHN and CelebA, as well as comparable quality of generated images to other recently developed generative models.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Learning Generative Models
Machine Learning: Clustering