Max-margin learning with the Bayes Factor

Abstract

We propose a new way to answer probabilistic queries that span multiple datapoints. We formalize reasoning about the similarity of different datapoints as the evaluation of the Bayes Factor within a hierarchical deep generative model that enforces a separation between the latent variables used for representation learning and those used for reasoning. Under this model, we derive an intuitive estimator for the Bayes Factor that represents similarity as the amount of overlap in representation space shared by different points. The estimator we derive relies on a query-conditional latent reasoning network, that parameterizes a distribution over the latent space of the deep generative model. The latent reasoning network is trained to amortize the posterior-predictive distribution under a hierarchical model using supervised data and a max-margin learning algorithm. We explore how the model may be used to focus the data variations captured in the latent space of the deep generative model and how this may be used to build new algorithms for few-shot learning.