Latent Space Optimal Transport for Generative Models

Abstract: Variational Auto-Encoders enforce their learned intermediate latent-space data distribution to be a simple distribution, such as an isotropic Gaussian. However, this causes the posterior collapse problem and loses manifold structure which can be important for datasets such as facial images. A GAN can transform a simple distribution to a latent-space data distribution and thus preserve the manifold structure, but optimizing a GAN involves solving a Min-Max optimization problem, which is difficult and not well understood so far. Therefore, we propose a GAN-like method to transform a simple distribution to a data distribution in the latent space by solving only a minimization problem. This minimization problem comes from training a discriminator between a simple distribution and a latent-space data distribution. Then, we can explicitly formulate an Optimal Transport (OT) problem that computes the desired mapping between the two distributions. This means that we can transform a distribution without solving the difficult Min-Max optimization problem. Experimental results on an eight-Gaussian dataset show that the proposed OT can handle multi-cluster distributions. Results on the MNIST and the CelebA datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.