Self-supervised variational auto-encoders

Density estimation, compression, and data generation are crucial tasks in artificial intelligence. Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) constitute a single framework to achieve these goals. Here, we present a novel class of generative models, called self-supervised Variational Auto-Encoder (selfVAE), which utilizes deterministic and discrete transformations of data. This class of models allows both conditional and unconditional sampling while simplifying the objective function. First, we use a single self-supervised transformation as a latent variable, where the transformation is either downscaling or edge detection. Next, we consider a hierarchical architecture, i.e., multiple transformations, and we show its benefits compared to the VAE. The flexibility of selfVAE in data reconstruction finds a particularly interesting use case in data compression tasks, where we can trade-off memory for better data quality and vice-versa. We present the performance of our approach on three benchmark image data (Cifar10, Imagenette64, and CelebA).