ALICE: Towards Understanding Adversarial Learning for Joint Distribution Matching

Chunyuan Li, Hao Liu, Changyou Chen, Yuchen Pu, Liqun Chen, Ricardo Henao, Lawrence Carin

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017)

We investigate the non-identifiability issues associated with bidirectional adversarial training for joint distribution matching. Within a framework of conditional entropy, we propose both adversarial and non-adversarial approaches to learn desirable matched joint distributions for unsupervised and supervised tasks. We unify a broad family of adversarial models as joint distribution matching problems. Our approach stabilizes learning of unsupervised bidirectional adversarial learning methods. Further, we introduce an extension for semi-supervised learning tasks. Theoretical results are validated in synthetic data and real-world applications.