Disentangling Domain and Content

Abstract: Many real-world datasets can be divided into groups according to certain salient features (e.g. grouping images by subject, grouping text by font, etc.). Often, machine learning tasks require that these features be represented separately from those manifesting independently of the grouping. For example, image translation entails changing the style of an image while preserving its content. We formalize these two kinds of attributes as two complementary generative factors called "domain" and "content", and address the problem of disentangling them in a fully unsupervised way. To achieve this, we propose a principled, generalizable probabilistic model inspired by the Variational Autoencoder. Our model exhibits state-of-the-art performance on the composite task of generating images by combining the domain of one input with the content of another. Distinctively, it can perform this task in a few-shot, unsupervised manner, without being provided with explicit labelling for either domain or content. The disentangled representations are learned through the combination of a group-wise encoder and a novel domain-confusion loss.