Improving Semantic Control in Discrete Latent Spaces with Transformer Quantized Variational Autoencoders

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Main Authors: Zhang, Yingji, Carvalho, Danilo S., Valentino, Marco, Pratt-Hartmann, Ian, Freitas, Andre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhang, Yingji
Carvalho, Danilo S.
Valentino, Marco
Pratt-Hartmann, Ian
Freitas, Andre
author_facet Zhang, Yingji
Carvalho, Danilo S.
Valentino, Marco
Pratt-Hartmann, Ian
Freitas, Andre
contents Achieving precise semantic control over the latent spaces of Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) holds significant value for downstream tasks in NLP as the underlying generative mechanisms could be better localised, explained and improved upon. Recent research, however, has struggled to achieve consistent results, primarily due to the inevitable loss of semantic information in the variational bottleneck and limited control over the decoding mechanism. To overcome these challenges, we investigate discrete latent spaces in Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoders (VQVAEs) to improve semantic control and generation in Transformer-based VAEs. In particular, We propose T5VQVAE, a novel model that leverages the controllability of VQVAEs to guide the self-attention mechanism in T5 at the token-level, exploiting its full generalization capabilities. Experimental results indicate that T5VQVAE outperforms existing state-of-the-art VAE models, including Optimus, in terms of controllability and preservation of semantic information across different tasks such as auto-encoding of sentences and mathematical expressions, text transfer, and inference. Moreover, T5VQVAE exhibits improved inference capabilities, suggesting potential applications for downstream natural language and symbolic reasoning tasks.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_00723
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Semantic Control in Discrete Latent Spaces with Transformer Quantized Variational Autoencoders
Zhang, Yingji
Carvalho, Danilo S.
Valentino, Marco
Pratt-Hartmann, Ian
Freitas, Andre
Computation and Language
Achieving precise semantic control over the latent spaces of Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) holds significant value for downstream tasks in NLP as the underlying generative mechanisms could be better localised, explained and improved upon. Recent research, however, has struggled to achieve consistent results, primarily due to the inevitable loss of semantic information in the variational bottleneck and limited control over the decoding mechanism. To overcome these challenges, we investigate discrete latent spaces in Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoders (VQVAEs) to improve semantic control and generation in Transformer-based VAEs. In particular, We propose T5VQVAE, a novel model that leverages the controllability of VQVAEs to guide the self-attention mechanism in T5 at the token-level, exploiting its full generalization capabilities. Experimental results indicate that T5VQVAE outperforms existing state-of-the-art VAE models, including Optimus, in terms of controllability and preservation of semantic information across different tasks such as auto-encoding of sentences and mathematical expressions, text transfer, and inference. Moreover, T5VQVAE exhibits improved inference capabilities, suggesting potential applications for downstream natural language and symbolic reasoning tasks.
title Improving Semantic Control in Discrete Latent Spaces with Transformer Quantized Variational Autoencoders
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00723