Deep-embedding methods aim to discover representations of a domain that make explicit the domain's class structure and thereby support few-shot learning. Disentangling methods aim to make explicit compositional or factorial structure. We combine these two active but independent lines of research and propose a new paradigm suitable for both goals. We propose and evaluate a novel loss function based on the $F$ statistic, which describes the separation of two or more distributions. By ensuring that distinct classes are well separated on a subset of embedding dimensions, we obtain embeddings that are useful for few-shot learning. By not requiring separation on all dimensions, we encourage the discovery of disentangled representations. Our embedding method matches or beats state-of-the-art, as evaluated by performance on recall@$k$ and few-shot learning tasks. Our method also obtains performance superior to a variety of alternatives on disentangling, as evaluated by two key properties of a disentangled representation: modularity and explicitness. The goal of our work is to obtain more interpretable, manipulable, and generalizable deep representations of concepts and categories.

Deep-embedding methods aim to discover representations of a domain that make explicit the domain's class structure and thereby support few-shot learning. Disentangling methods aim to make explicit compositional or factorial structure. We combine these two active but independent lines of research and propose a new paradigm suitable for both goals. We propose and evaluate a novel loss function based on the F statistic, which describes the separation of two or more distributions. By ensuring that distinct classes are well separated on a subset of embedding dimensions, we obtain embeddings that are useful for few-shot learning.

This approach tries to connect together the literature of learning deep embeddings and the literature on disentangled representation learning. In particular, it leverages the weakly supervised training process of the deep embeddings literature, which relies on the availability of data that either belongs to a class (shares a particular generative factor) or not. The authors encourage disentangling by separating the examples of the different classes based on independent per-embedding-dimension hypothesis testing using the F-statistic loss. Two examples are considered to belong to different classes based on their dissimilarity on a subset of d dimensions of the embedding, which allows the approach to be more flexible. The authors also show that this approach works when the separation is done not on class labels, but on attribute features.

Deep-embedding methods aim to discover representations of a domain that make explicit the domain's class structure and thereby support few-shot learning. Disentangling methods aim to make explicit compositional or factorial structure. We combine these two active but independent lines of research and propose a new paradigm suitable for both goals. We propose and evaluate a novel loss function based on the $F$ statistic, which describes the separation of two or more distributions. By ensuring that distinct classes are well separated on a subset of embedding dimensions, we obtain embeddings that are useful for few-shot learning.