The Variational Fair Autoencoder

We investigate the problem of learning representations that are invariant to certain nuisance or sensitive factors of variation in the data while retaining as much of the remaining information as possible. Our model is based on a variational autoencoding architecture (Kingma & Welling, 2014; Rezende et al., 2014) with priors that encourage independence between sensitive and latent factors of variation. Any subsequent processing, such as classification, can then be performed on this purged latent representation. To remove any remaining dependencies we incorporate an additional penalty term based on the "Maximum Mean Discrepancy" (MMD) (Gretton et al., 2006) measure. We discuss how these architectures can be efficiently trained on data and show in experiments that this method is more effective than previous work in removing unwanted sources of variation while maintaining informative latent representations. In "Representation Learning" one tries to find representations of the data that are informative for a particular task while removing the factors of variation that are uninformative and are typically detrimental for the task under consideration. Uninformative dimensions are often called "noise" or "nuisance variables" while informative dimensions are usually called latent or hidden factors of variation.