Semi-supervised learning is sought for leveraging the unlabelled data when labelled data is difficult or expensive to acquire. Deep generative models (e.g., Variational Autoencoder (VAE)) and semisupervised Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently shown promising performance in semi-supervised classification for the excellent discriminative representing ability. However, the latent code learned by the traditional VAE is not exclusive (repeatable) for a specific input sample, which prevents it from excellent classification performance. In particular, the learned latent representation depends on a non-exclusive component which is stochastically sampled from the prior distribution. Moreover, the semi-supervised GAN models generate data from pre-defined distribution (e.g., Gaussian noises) which is independent of the input data distribution and may obstruct the convergence and is difficult to control the distribution of the generated data. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel Adversarial Variational Embedding (AVAE) framework for robust and effective semi-supervised learning to leverage both the advantage of GAN as a high quality generative model and VAE as a posterior distribution learner. The proposed approach first produces an exclusive latent code by the model which we call VAE++, and meanwhile, provides a meaningful prior distribution for the generator of GAN. The proposed approach is evaluated over four different real-world applications and we show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models, which confirms that the combination of VAE++ and GAN can provide significant improvements in semisupervised classification.

Several dihedral angles prediction methods were developed for protein structure prediction and their other applications. However, distribution of predicted angles would not be similar to that of real angles. To address this we employed generative adversarial networks (GAN). Generative adversarial networks are composed of two adversarially trained networks: a discriminator and a generator. A discriminator distinguishes samples from a dataset and generated samples while a generator generates realistic samples. Although the discriminator of GANs is trained to estimate density, GAN model is intractable. On the other hand, noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) was introduced to estimate a normalization constant of an unnormalized statistical model and thus the density function. In this thesis, we introduce noise-contrastive estimation generative adversarial networks (NCE-GAN) which enables explicit density estimation of a GAN model. And a new loss for the generator is proposed. We also propose residue-wise variants of auxiliary classifier GAN (AC-GAN) and Semi-supervised GAN to handle sequence information in a window. In our experiment, the conditional generative adversarial network (C-GAN), AC-GAN and Semi-supervised GAN were compared. And experiments done with improved conditions were invested. We identified a phenomenon of AC-GAN that distribution of its predicted angles is composed of unusual clusters. The distribution of the predicted angles of Semi-supervised GAN was most similar to the Ramachandran plot. We found that adding the output of the NCE as an additional input of the discriminator is helpful to stabilize the training of the GANs and to capture the detailed structures. Adding regression loss and using predicted angles by regression loss only model could improve the conditional generation performance of the C-GAN and AC-GAN.