Tag Archives: Human Faces

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – X – a method to create suitable latent vectors for the generation of human face images

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My present post series explores options to use a standard convolutional Autoencoder [AE] for the creation of images with human faces. The face generation should based on random input to the AE’s Decoder. On our quest for a suitable method we have meanwhile learned a lot about other aspects of Autoencoders, vector distributions in multi-dimensional latent spaces and generative methods for our special case:

  • Methods to create statistical latent vectors [z-vectors] as input for the AE’s Decoder must be chosen carefully. Among other things: It is difficult to create a bunch of random vectors which cover wider areas in the vastness of a multidimensional space. So the z-vector creation must be adjusted to specific requirements.
  • After having been trained with CelebA images a convolutional AE fills a limited and coherent region in the latent space with z-points for the training images. This latent space region appears to be critical for successful image creation: Statistically generated z-vectors should point to this region. The core of the z-point distribution gets filled relatively densely.
  • A convolutional AE maps human face images onto an approximate multivariate normal distribution. This gives the inner core of the z-point distribution the structure of a multidimensional ellipsoid. The projections of this ellipsoid onto 2-dimensional coordinate planes show characteristic nested elliptic contour lines.
  • As the main axes of these ellipses were inclined with different angle towards the axes of chosen coordinate planes we concluded that linear correlations mark average dependencies between the z-vector components. Limiting conditions imposed by these correlations must also be fulfilled by z-vectors used as the Decoder’s input.

See previous posts in this series for more details. In particular, the last 2 posts

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – IX – PCA transformation of the z-point distribution for CelebA

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – VIII – approximation of the latent vector distribution by a multivariate normal distribution and ellipses

have shown that the density distribution for the z-points really exhibits elliptic contour lines in the original coordinate system of the latent space and (!) in the target coordinate system of a PCA transformation.

In this post we use our gathered knowledge: I present a first simple method to generate z-vectors which point to the latent space region filled by z-points for CelebA images. These z-vectors will fulfill the general and limiting elliptic conditions for their components.

Decomposing the full problem of latent vector generation into a sequence of 2-dimensional problems

The nice thing about multivariate Gaussian distributions with linear correlations between the vector components is the following: We can reduce the problem of choosing proper component values to a series of 2-dimensional restrictions. Firstly we can use characteristic properties of the Gaussian distribution for each component. And secondly we can use confidence ellipses in 2-dimensional coordinate planes to restrict the component values to allowed intervals.

Ellipses are most easy to handle when their axes are aligned with the axes of the coordinate system in which we describe them. So, let us assume that we know an affine transformation T to a new coordinate system which also has orthogonal axes and supports the following special transformation properties for a multivariate normal density distribution:

  1. T maps nested elliptic contour lines of the multidimensional density distribution and in particular confidence ellipses for component pairs in the original coordinate system to nested elliptic contours and confidence ellipses in the new coordinate system.
  2. Taligns the centers of the transformed ellipses with the origin of the new coordinate system.
  3. T aligns the main axes of the mapped ellipses with the axes of the new coordinate system.
  4. T is reversible.

How could we then use the transformed data for vector-creation?

In the new coordinate system, a contour ellipse in a chosen coordinate plane for the axes-indices (i, j) may have main diameters of size

d1 = 2 * a    and    d2 = 2 * b.

We then can first select a random v_i value to fall into a range [-a * fact, a * fact].

– fact * a    <    v_i    <    fact * a

With fact being a proper factor. This factor defines a confidence level in the new coordinate system. With the value of v_i fixed and b being the half-diameter in the orthogonal direction the correlation condition for the z-point distribution says that the v_j value must fall into an interval [-c, c] defined by:

-c    <    v_j    <    c,
with c = b * fact * sqrt(1 – x**2 / (fact * a)**2)

But within these limits we can again choose the v_j-value freely. Below I use a simple random-function for a constant probability density to pick a value.

However: It would not be enough to restrict the coordinates to the conditions of just one ellipse! The components of the created vectors must in parallel fulfill elliptic conditions for all of the possible pairs of vector-components. I.e. we may need to adapt the v_j values gained from the analysis of a fist 2D-ellipse to further conditions of other ellipses and component pairs. This can be achieved by an iteration. For z_dim = 256 this involves a total of 32640 checks and possible value-adaptions to each and all of the allowed value ranges.

In addition: The order by which the component-pairs and their conditions are investigated must be randomized to get real statistical vector distributions.

Eventually the resulting vector components must be re-transformed into the original coordinate system of the latent space.

The ellipse for the “core’s boundary” in the original coordinate system will be defined by the chosen confidence level of the ellipsoidal normal distribution. We saw already that a confidence level of σ = 2.0 defines the transition to outer regions of the z-point density distribution quite well.

This all sounds manageable by relative simple Python programs. But: Do we know a proper transformation T? Yes, we do: A PCA-transformation of the z-point density distribution has all the properties discussed above.

Using half maximum values after a PCA transformation of the z-point distribution

The last post proved that a PCA transformation maps ellipses onto ellipses for component pairs in the transformed PCA coordinate system. The advantage of the ellipses there is that their main axes are on average well aligned with the orthogonal PCA coordinate axes. Gaussians for the number density distribution per component are mapped to Gaussians for the new components in the transformed coordinate system. So, the basic idea for a proper z-vector generation is:

  1. Take the multivariate normal z-point distribution for the training images in the AE’s latent space.
  2. Apply a PCA analysis to diagonalize the correlation matrix and transform the z-vector components to the PCA coordinate system.
  3. Use the ellipses in coordinate planes of the PCA coordinate system to create random z-vector components fulfilling all required conditions there.
  4. Re-transform the resulting z-vector components into the original coordinate system of the latent space.

Point 3 in our method is covered by a numerical analysis of the Gaussians in the PCA-coordinate system. We determine the half-width numerically by analyzing the density distribution with the help of sampling intervals. This simple method has resolution limits related to the size of the sampling interval. This has consequences for PCA components with a small standard deviation. We saw already in the last posts that such distributions appear for higher PCA components at the lower end of the explained variance.

Does the suggested method work?

The convolutional AE we work with was defined in previous posts with 4 Conv2D layers in the Encoder and 4 Conv2DTranspose layers in Decoder. The number of latent space dimensions was z_dim = 256. The AE network was trained on CelebA images. I do not want to bore you with details of the codes for the creation of z-vectors consistent to the resulting elliptic conditions. It is all standard. The PCA-transformation can e.g. be taken from the sklearn-package.

I have applied a constant probability density to choose a random value within the allowed ranges for the component values of the aspired z-vectors in the PCA coordinate system. For the plots below I have used the most important 50 to 105 PCA components (out of 256). The plots include confidence ellipses on a level of σ = 2.2. I derived the confidence ellipses by directly evaluating the standard deviations of the transformed distribution data in all coordinate directions.

The first plot shows you such an ellipse for the coordinate plane corresponding to the first two, most important PCA components. The orange points mark 20 z-points defined by 20 randomly z-vectors fulfilling all elliptic conditions. The plot contains 120,000 z-points for images out of the 170,000 CelebA pictures used during training.

Generated statistical vectors in the PCA coordinate system

For elliptic contour lines see the last post before the present one in this series. The next plot shows the same generated 20 z-vectors for other component-combinations among the first 20 of the most important PCA-components. The plots contain a selection of 60,000 z-points.

The outer z-points points do not always indicate that we have elliptic contours in the denser core of the displayed 2-dimensional distributions. But see the last post for proofs that the inner core inside the red ellipse really displays elliptic contours. You see that all random vectors lie within the 2-σ-ellipses.

The next plot shows the generated z-vectors in the original coordinate system of the latent space. The component values were back-transformed from the PCA-system to the original coordinate system.

Generated statistical z-vectors after an inverse PCA transformation to the original coordinate system of the latent space

We get similar plots for other component pairs. And of course for other generated vectors.

Generated statistical z-vectors in the PCA coordinate system

Generated statistical z-vectors after an inverse PCA transformation to the original coordinate system of the latent space

Technically we have obviously achieved what we wanted: Our generated statistical vectors are distributed within the core of our multidimensional ellipsoid.

Note that this method fortunately works even when we use a limited number of the PCA components, only. This is due to intricate properties of a PCA transformation which guarantee that a back-transformation puts the resulting points close to the original ones even when we omit less important PCA components. I cannot discuss the math-details in this blog. You have to see scientific literature for this. An introduction is e.g. provided by https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.1100.pdf.

For me this property of the PCA transformation was helpful when I ran into the resolution problem for a proper half-width of the Gaussians. Taking 256 components lead to errors as elliptic conditions for very narrow Gaussians were not properly defined and some of the created vectors left the allowed value ranges.

Resulting face images

Let us look at some results. First I want to remind you from where we started:

Failed trials with improper random z-vectors based on constant probability densities

A simple random generator used in the beginning was totally inapt to feed the AE’s Decoder with proper statistical z-vectors. And now – look at the following plots. They were produced for a varying number of PCA components between 50 and 120, 100000 statistically selected z-points within a 3 σ-level for the PCA-transformation and various factors 0.6 < fact < 0.8 used upon a half-width corresponding to a confidence level of 2.35 σ:

In some cases – for a higher number of PCA components – we even see smaller details of the face images and a reasonable transition to some kind of hairdo. Please remember that z_dim = 256 is a pretty low number for the latent space to cover the encoding of face details. And celebrities as covered by CelebA use make-up ….

In case you think the above result is not noteworthy: Please remember that we talk about a simple standard Autoencoder and not about a Variational Autoencoder and neither about a transformer based Autoencoder. No fancy additions to cost functions or special layers. And who ever has read the very instructive book of D. Foster on “Generative Deep Learning” (1st edition, O’Reilly) may compare his images to mine. And I have used a lower resolution of the original images than D. Foster. Just to motivate people to look a bit deeper into properties of data distributions in latent spaces.

Conclusion and outlook

We have come a lot closer to our objective of using a standard minimal Autoencoder for generative purposes. On our way, we got a much deeper understanding of the vector-distribution a trained AE creates in its latent space for human face images.

The method presented in this post to create reasonable statistical z-vectors still has its limits and there is a lot of open space for improvements. Attentive readers may e.g. ask: Why did he not use confidence ellipses directly? And why not the ellipses found in the original coordinate system of the latent space? And what about micro-correlations? And are there clusters for certain properties as the hair-color, sex, smiling, etc. in the multivariate z-point distribution in the AE’s latent space?

I will discuss these topics in further posts. In the meantime keep in mind that the basic point for turning a standard Autoencoder into a generative tool is to understand how it fills its latent space.

Note also that I myself have speculated in other posts of this blog that failures of using standard AEs for generative purposes may have their ultimate reason in the micro-structure of the z-point distribution. The present results render these previous ideas of mine plain wrong.

Links to previous posts of this series

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – IX – PCA transformation of the z-point distribution for CelebA

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – VIII – approximation of the latent vector distribution by a multivariate normal distribution and ellipses

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – VII – face images from statistical z-points within the latent space region of CelebA

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – VI – image creation from z-points along paths in selected coordinate planes of the latent space

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – V – reconstruction of human face images from simple statistical z-point-distributions?

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – IV – CelebA and statistical vector distributions in the surroundings of the latent space origin

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – III – correlations of latent vector components

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – II – number distributions of latent vector components

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – I – Encoder, Decoder, latent space

 

And before we forget it: Besides the Putler in the east there is also an extremist right-wing, semi-fascistic party in Germany on a record high support level in the population of 18%. This is a party which wants to stop all sanctions against the Russian aggressor in the ongoing war in Ukraine. You see the pattern behind this? This party is presently becoming bigger in number of supporters than the government leading social democrats. So, there is more at stake at present in Europe than the war in Ukraine. We need to defend our democracies with all the means of democracies. And its time to ask for more decisive legal action against a party which already is under observation of the German internal secret service.

 

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – IX – PCA transformation of the z-point distribution for CelebA

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This series of posts is about standard convolutional Autoencoders [AEs]. We wish to use the creative ability of an AE’s Decoder for the creation of human face images. We trained a relatively simple example AE on the CelebA data set. For the generation of new human face images we wanted to feed the Decoder with randomly created z-vectors in the AE’s latent space. As arbitrary latent vectors did not deliver reasonable images, we had a look at properties of the z-point distribution created in the latent space after training. And we found the z-vectors with end-points within this particular region indeed gave us some first reasonable images.

But during the first posts we also had to learn that it requires substantial effort to produce “randomly” created z-vectors which point to the coherent and confined latent space region populated by z-points for CelebA images. In addition we found that we obviously must fulfill complex correlation conditions between the latent vector components. In the last posts we have, therefore, investigated the structure of the latent space region populated for CelebA images a bit more closely. See:

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – VIII – approximation of the latent vector distribution by a multivariate normal distribution and ellipses

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – VII – face images from statistical z-points within the latent space region of CelebA

This gave us a somewhat surprising insight:

For our special case of human face images the density distribution of the z-points in the multidimensional latent space roughly resembled a multivariate normal distribution. The variables of this distribution were, of course, the components of the latent z-vectors (reaching from the origin of the latent space coordinate system to the z-points). The number density distributions for the values of the z-vector components could very well be approximated by Gaussian functions. In addition we found strong linear correlations between the z-vector components. This was completely consistent with diagonally oriented elliptic contour lines of the number density distribution for pairs of z-vector components in the respective coordinate planes. The angles between the ellipses’ axes and the axes of the (orthogonal) coordinate system varied.

In this post we test my thesis of a multivariate normal distribution in a different and more complicated way. If the number density distribution of the z-points for CelebA really is close to a multivariate normal distribution then we would expect that the contour lines of the 2-dimensional number density function for coordinate planes still are ellipses after a PCA transformation. Note that the coordinate planes then are planes of a new coordinate system (with orthogonal axes) moved and rotated with respect to the original coordinate system. We call the transformed coordinate system the “PCA coordinate system“. (It is clear the vector components must consistently be transformed with respect to the new coordinate axes.)

This test is much harder because asymmetries, imperfections and deviations from a normal distribution will become clearly visible. Nevertheless we shall see that the z-point distribution decomposes roughly in uncorrelated Gaussian number density (or probability) functions for the (transformed) components of the z-vectors – as expected.

Note that number density distributions can be interpreted as probability distributions after a proper normalization. To understand the results and implications of this post some basic knowledge about multivariate normal probability density distributions in multidimensional spaces is required. Transformation properties of such distributions are important. In particular the effect of a PCA or SVD transformation, which diagonalizes the Pearson correlation matrix, on a multivariate normal distribution, should be familiar: In the moved and rotated coordinate system original linear correlations between vector components disappear. The coordinate axes of the transformed coordinate system get aligned to the eigenvectors (and main axes) of the probability density distribution. In addition elliptic contour lines prevail and the main axes of the ellipses get aligned with the axes of the PCA coordinate system.

For valuable information in previous posts see the link list a the bottom of this article.

Imperfections in the multivariate normal distribution and their consequences for PCA

In our case the latent space had 256 dimensions. The real number density functions for the values of the (256) latent vector components did not always show the full symmetry of their Gaussian fits. Deviations appeared near the center and at the flanks of the individual distributions. Still we got convincing overall ellipses in contour plots of the probability density for selected pairs of components. But there were also relatively many points which lay in regions outside the 2 to 3 sigma confidence ellipses for these 2-dimensional distributions – and the distribution of the points there seemed to violate the elliptic symmetry.

A perfect multivariate normal distribution (with only linear correlations between its variables) decomposes into (seemingly) uncorrelated normal distributions for the new variables, namely the latent vector components in the transformed coordinate system of the latent space. The coordinate transformation corresponds to a diagonalization of the Pearson correlation matrix via finding orthogonal eigenvectors. So we should not only get ellipses after the PCA transformation. The main axes of the resulting ellipses should also be aligned with the coordinate axes of the new translated and rotated PCA coordinate system. (This is a standard feature of “uncorrelated” Gaussians).

Note that the de-correlation is a pure coordinate effect which does not eliminate the dependencies of the original variables. The new coordinates and the respective variables do not have the same meaning as the old ones. We “only” change perspectives such that the mathematical description of the multivariate distribution gets simpler. However, the ratios of the axes of the new ellipses depend on the axis-ratios of the old ellipses in the original standard coordinate system of the latent space.

When we translate and rotate a coordinate system to diagonalize the Pearson matrix of an imperfect multivariate normal distribution the coordinate axes may afterward not fully align with the main axes of the distribution’s inner core – and then we might get clearly visible asymmetries in z-point projections to coordinate planes. Note that points outside the inner core have a relatively large impact on the PCA transformation and especially on the rotation of the new axes with respect to the old ones.

Reduction of outer z-point contributions

Outer z-points often correspond to CelebA images with strong variations in the background. As these z-points have a large distance from the center of the distribution they have a heavy impact on a PCA transformation to eigenvectors of the Pearson matrix. Therefore, I eliminated some outer points from the distribution. I did this by deleting points with coordinate values smaller or bigger than a symmetric threshold in the outer flanks of the 256 Gaussian distributions – e.g.:

z_j < mu_j – fact * FHWM and z_j > mu_j + fact * FHWM.

With FHWM meaning the full width at the half maximum and mu_j being the center of the approximate Gaussian for the j-th vector component of the z-vectors. I tried multiple values of fact between 1.7 and 1.25.

One has to be careful with such an elimination process. Even though we set our limits beyond the 2 σ-level of the individual Gaussians ahead of the transformation, a step-wise consecutive elimination for all components reduces the number of surviving vectors significantly for small values of fact. The plots below correspond to a value of fact = 1.7 (with one discussed exception). This reduced the number of available vectors from originally 170.000 used during the AE’s training to 160.000. From this distribution a random sub-selection of 80,000 z-points was taken to perform the PCA transformation. I call the resulting sample of z-points the “reduced distribution” below. The results did not change much for a sub-selection of more points. The second reduction saved me some CPU-time, however.

PCA transformation of the z-point distribution – explained variance and cumulative importance

Below you see the explained variance ratio of the first 40 and the cumulative importance of the first 120 main components after a PCA transformation of the reduced z-point distribution. (The PCA-algorithm was based on the SVD-algorithm, as provided by the sklearn-package.)

We see that we need around 120 PCA components to explain 80% of the variance of the original z-point data. The contribution of the first 15 components is significant, but it is NOT really dominant. Interesting is also the step-wise decline of the first 10 components in a not so smooth curve.

I have in addition checked that the normalized Pearson correlation coefficient matrix was perfectly diagonalized. All off-diagonal values were smaller than 2.e-7 (which is consistent with error propagation) and the diagonal elements were 1.0 with an accuracy better than 8 eight digits after the decimal point. As it should be.

Gaussians per PCA-vector component?

We expect Gaussian number density functions for each of the z-vector components after the PCA coordinate transformation. The following line plots show the number density distributions (colored line) and a related Gaussian fit (dashed lines) per named vector-components after PCA-transformation. The first plot gives an overview over 120 PCA components:

We see that all distributions look similar to Gaussians. In addition the center of the distributions for all components are very close to or coincide with the origin of the PCA coordinate system. This is something we would expect for an original multivariate normal distribution before the PCA transformation to a new moved and rotated coordinate system: An affine transformation between coordinate systems with orthogonal axes maps Gaussians to Gaussians.

Components 0 and 1:

Components 2 and 3:

Components 4 and 5:

Components 6 and 7:

Components 8 and 9:

We see from these plots that component 3 shows values at the distributions’s flanks well above the values of its Gaussian fit. This may lead to deformed ellipses. In addition component 7 shows a slight asymmetry – probably triggering deviations both at the center and outer regions. Similar effects can be seen for other higher components – but not so pronounced. The chosen sampling interval (0.5) in the new coordinates did smear out small asymmetric wiggles in all distributions.

Ellipses?

Calculating approximate contour lines is CPU intensive. On my presently available laptop I had to focus on some selected examples for pairs of components of z-vectors in the transformed coordinate system. Experiments showed that the most critical components with respect to asymmetries were 2, 3, 7, 8.

Let us first look at combinations of the first 9 PCA components (0) with other components in the range between the 10th and 120th PCA component. Just scroll down to see more images:

The fatter lines represent confidence ellipses derived both from correlation data, i.e. elements of the normalized correlation coefficient matrix, and properties of the Gaussian distributions. See the last blog for details on the method of getting confidence ellipses from data of a probability distribution.

Ellipses for density distributions in coordinate planes for pars of the most important PCA components

Before you think that everything is just perfect we should focus on the most important 10 PCA components and their mutual pair-wise density distributions. We expect trouble especially for combinations with the components 2, 3 and 7.

Component 0 vs other components < 10

We see already here that asymmetries in the density distributions which appear relatively small in the gaussian-like curves per component leave their imprint on the elliptic curves. The contour lines are not always centered with respect to the overall confidence ellipses.

Component 1 vs other components < 10

Component 2 vs other components < 10

The plot for components 2 and 3 was based on fact = 1.35 instead of fact = 1.7. See a section below for more information.

Component 3 vs other components < 10

Component 4 vs other components < 10

Component 5 vs other components < 10

Component 6 vs other components < 10

Component 7 vs other components < 10

Component 8 vs other components < 10

Component 9 vs other components < 10

Ellipses for other seected component pairs

Comments

The z-point distribution is rather close to a multivariate normal distribution, but it is not perfect. The PCA transformation revealed clearly that the center of the overall z-point distribution does not completely coincide with the centers of the individual density distributions for the z-vector components. And not all individual curves are fully symmetrical. Some plots show the expected ellipses, but not fully centered. We also see signs of non-linear correlations as not all ellipses show a complete alignment with the axes of the PCA coordinate system.

The impact of outer z-points becomes obvious when we compare plots for the component pair (2, 3) for different values of fact. The plots are for fact = 1.35, 1.45, 1.55, 1.7 and fact = 1.8 (in this order from left to right and downward). (Regarding z-point elimination the fact-values correspond to 122000, 138000, 149000, 159000 and 164000 remaining z-points.)

The flips in the left-right orientation between some of the plots can be ignored. They depend on random aspects of the transformations and plotting routines used.

We see that z-points (for some some strange images) which have a large distance from the center of the distribution have a major impact on the central density distribution. 10% of the outer points influence the orientation of the central ellipses by their coordinates – although these outer points are not part of the inner core of the distribution.

BUT: Overall we find the effect we wanted to see. The elliptic contours are clearly visible and most of them are aligned with the axes of the PCA coordinate system and the main axes of the confidence ellipses for the z-point distribution in the PCA coordinate system. The inner core is aligned with the axes of the coordinate system even for the critical PCA components 2 and 3, when we omit between 12% and 25% of the points (outside a 3 σ-level).

This means: The PCA transformation confirms that an inner core of the z-point distribution is well described by a multivariate normal distribution – with linear correlations between the number density distributions for various components.

This is an interesting finding by itself.

Conclusion

The last and the present post of this series have shown that a convolutional AE maps human face images of the CelebA data set to a multivariate normal distribution in its multidimensional latent space. Although this is interesting by itself we must not forget our ultimate goal – namely to generate random z-vectors which should deliver us reasonably human face images by the AE’s Decoder. But the results of our analysis provide solid criteria to generate such vectors fulfilling complex correlation conditions.

We can now define statistical generation methods which restrict the components of our aspired random z-vectors such that the resulting z-points lie within regions surrounded by confidence ellipses of the multivariate normal distribution. One such method is the topic of the next post.

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – X – a method to create suitable latent vectors for the generation of human face images

Links to other posts of this series

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – VIII – approximation of the latent vector distribution by a multivariate normal distribution and ellipses

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – VII – face images from statistical z-points within the latent space region of CelebA

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – VI – image creation from z-points along paths in selected coordinate planes of the latent space

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – V – reconstruction of human face images from simple statistical z-point-distributions?

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – IV – CelebA and statistical vector distributions in the surroundings of the latent space origin

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – III – correlations of latent vector components

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – II – number distributions of latent vector components

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – I – Encoder, Decoder, latent space

 

Autoencoders and latent space fragmentation – I – Encoder, Decoder, latent space

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This series of posts is about a special kind of Artificial Neural Networks [ANNs] – namely so called Autoencoders [AEs] and their questionable creative abilities.

The series replaces two previous posts in this blog on a similar topic. My earlier posts were not wrong regarding the results of calculations presented there, but they contained premature conclusions. In this series I hope to perform a somewhat better analysis.

Abilities of Autoencoders and the question of a creative application of AEs

On the one hand side AEs can be trained to encode and compress object information. On the other hand side AEs can decode previously encoded information and reconstruct related original objects from the retrieved information.

A simple application of an AE, therefore, is the compression of image data and the reconstruction of images from compressed data. But, after a suitable adaption of the training process and its input data, we can also use AEs for other purposes. Examples are the denoising of disturbed images or the recoloring of grey images. In the latter cases the reconstructive properties of AEs play an important role.

An interesting question is: Can one utilize the reconstructive abilities of an AE for generative or creative purposes?

This post series will give an answer for the special case of images showing human faces. To say it clearly: I am talking about conventional AEs, not about Variational Autoencoders and neither about state of the art AEs based on transformer technology.

Most text books on Machine Learning [ML] would claim that at least Variational Autoencoders (instead of AEs) are required to create reasonable images of human faces … Well, to trigger a bit of your attention: Below you find some images of human faces created by standard Autoencoder – and NOT by a Variational Autoencoder.

I admit: These pictures are far from perfect, but at least they show clear features of human faces. Not exactly what we expect of a pure conventional Autoencoder fed with statistical input. I apologize for the bias towards female faces, but that is a “prejudice” of the AE caused by my chosen set of training data. And the lack of hairdo-details will later be commented on.

I promise: Analyzing the behavior of conventional AEs is still an interesting topic. Despite many and sophisticated modern alternatives for creative purposes. The reason is that we learn something about the way how an AE organizes the information which it gains during training.

Continue reading →