Revisiting Disentanglement in Downstream Tasks: A Study on Its Necessity for Abstract Visual Reasoning

In representation learning, a disentangled representation is highly desirable as it encodes generative factors of data in a separable and compact pattern. Researchers have advocated leveraging disentangled representations to complete downstream tasks with encouraging empirical evidence. This paper further investigates the necessity of disentangled representation in downstream applications. Specifically, we show that dimension-wise disentangled representations are unnecessary on a fundamental downstream task, abstract visual reasoning. We provide extensive empirical evidence against the necessity of disentanglement, covering multiple datasets, representation learning methods, and downstream network architectures. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the informativeness of representations is a better indicator of downstream performance than disentanglement. Finally, the positive correlation between informativeness and disentanglement explains the claimed usefulness of disentangled representations in previous works. The source code is available at https://github.com/Richard-coder-Nai/disentanglement-lib-necessity.git.

An Empirical Study on Disentanglement of Negative-free Contrastive Learning

Negative-free contrastive learning has attracted a lot of attention with simplicity and impressive performance for large-scale pretraining. But its disentanglement property remains unexplored. In this paper, we take different negative-free contrastive learning methods to study the disentanglement property of this genre of self-supervised methods empirically. We find the existing disentanglement metrics fail to make meaningful measurements for the high-dimensional representation model so we propose a new disentanglement metric based on Mutual Information between representation and data factors. With the proposed metric, we benchmark the disentanglement property of negative-free contrastive learning for the first time, on both popular synthetic datasets and a real-world dataset CelebA. Our study shows that the investigated methods can learn a well-disentangled subset of representation. We extend the study of the disentangled representation learning to high-dimensional representation space and negative-free contrastive learning for the first time. The implementation of the proposed metric is available at \url{https://github.com/noahcao/disentanglement_lib_med}.

Real Additive Margin Softmax for Speaker Verification

The additive margin softmax (AM-Softmax) loss has delivered remarkable performance in speaker verification. A supposed behavior of AM-Softmax is that it can shrink within-class variation by putting emphasis on target logits, which in turn improves margin between target and non-target classes. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis on the behavior of AM-Softmax loss, and show that this loss does not implement real max-margin training. Based on this observation, we present a Real AM-Softmax loss which involves a true margin function in the softmax training. Experiments conducted on VoxCeleb1, SITW and CNCeleb demonstrated that the corrected AM-Softmax loss consistently outperforms the original one. The code has been released at https://gitlab.com/csltstu/sunine.