Recent work in synthetic data generation in the time-series domain has focused on the use of Generative Adversarial Networks. We propose a novel architecture for synthetically generating time-series data with the use of Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs). The proposed architecture has several distinct properties: interpretability, ability to encode domain knowledge, and reduced training times. We evaluate data generation quality by similarity and predictability against four multivariate datasets. We experiment with varying sizes of training data to measure the impact of data availability on generation quality for our VAE method as well as several state-of-the-art data generation methods. Our results on similarity tests show that the VAE approach is able to accurately represent the temporal attributes of the original data. On next-step prediction tasks using generated data, the proposed VAE architecture consistently meets or exceeds performance of state-of-the-art data generation methods. While noise reduction may cause the generated data to deviate from original data, we demonstrate the resulting de-noised data can significantly improve performance for next-step prediction using generated data. Finally, the proposed architecture can incorporate domain-specific time-patterns such as polynomial trends and seasonalities to provide interpretable outputs. Such interpretability can be highly advantageous in applications requiring transparency of model outputs or where users desire to inject prior knowledge of time-series patterns into the generative model.
We study a new generative modeling technique based on adversarial training (AT). We show that in a setting where the model is trained to discriminate in-distribution data from adversarial examples perturbed from out-distribution samples, the model learns the support of the in-distribution data. The learning process is also closely related to MCMC-based maximum likelihood learning of energy-based models (EBMs), and can be considered as an approximate maximum likelihood learning method. We show that this AT generative model achieves competitive image generation performance to state-of-the-art EBMs, and at the same time is stable to train and has better sampling efficiency. We demonstrate that the AT generative model is well-suited for the task of image translation and worst-case out-of-distribution detection.
Orthogonal polynomials of several variables have a vector-valued three-term recurrence relation, much like the corresponding one-dimensional relation. This relation requires only knowledge of certain recurrence matrices, and allows simple and stable evaluation of multivariate orthogonal polynomials. In the univariate case, various algorithms can evaluate the recurrence coefficients given the ability to compute polynomial moments, but such a procedure is absent in multiple dimensions. We present a new Multivariate Stieltjes (MS) algorithm that fills this gap in the multivariate case, allowing computation of recurrence matrices assuming moments are available. The algorithm is essentially explicit in two and three dimensions, but requires the numerical solution to a non-convex problem in more than three dimensions. Compared to direct Gram-Schmidt-type orthogonalization, we demonstrate on several examples in up to three dimensions that the MS algorithm is far more stable, and allows accurate computation of orthogonal bases in the multivariate setting, in contrast to direct orthogonalization approaches.
The reliability of wireless base stations in China Mobile is of vital importance, because the cell phone users are connected to the stations and the behaviors of the stations are directly related to user experience. Although the monitoring of the station behaviors can be realized by anomaly detection on multivariate time series, due to complex correlations and various temporal patterns of multivariate series in large-scale stations, building a general unsupervised anomaly detection model with a higher F1-score remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a General representation of multivariate time series for Anomaly Detection(GenAD). First, we pre-train a general model on large-scale wireless base stations with self-supervision, which can be easily transferred to a specific station anomaly detection with a small amount of training data. Second, we employ Multi-Correlation Attention and Time-Series Attention to represent the correlations and temporal patterns of the stations. With the above innovations, GenAD increases F1-score by total 9% on real-world datasets in China Mobile, while the performance does not significantly degrade on public datasets with only 10% of the training data.
Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
The prevalence of networked sensors and actuators in many real-world systems such as smart buildings, factories, power plants, and data centers generate substantial amounts of multivariate time series data for these systems. The rich sensor data can be continuously monitored for intrusion events through anomaly detection. However, conventional threshold-based anomaly detection methods are inadequate due to the dynamic complexities of these systems, while supervised machine learning methods are unable to exploit the large amounts of data due to the lack of labeled data. On the other hand, current unsupervised machine learning approaches have not fully exploited the spatial-temporal correlation and other dependencies amongst the multiple variables (sensors/actuators) in the system for detecting anomalies. In this work, we propose an unsupervised multivariate anomaly detection method based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Instead of treating each data stream independently, our proposed MAD-GAN framework considers the entire variable set concurrently to capture the latent interactions amongst the variables. We also fully exploit both the generator and discriminator produced by the GAN, using a novel anomaly score called DR-score to detect anomalies by discrimination and reconstruction. We have tested our proposed MAD-GAN using two recent datasets collected from real-world CPS: the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) and the Water Distribution (WADI) datasets. Our experimental results showed that the proposed MAD-GAN is effective in reporting anomalies caused by various cyber-intrusions compared in these complex real-world systems.
Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown promising performance in generating realistic images. However, they often struggle in learning complex underlying modalities in a given dataset, resulting in poor-quality generated images. To mitigate this problem, we present a novel approach called mixture of experts GAN (MEGAN), an ensemble approach of multiple generator networks. Each generator network in MEGAN specializes in generating images with a particular subset of modalities, e.g., an image class. Instead of incorporating a separate step of handcrafted clustering of multiple modalities, our proposed model is trained through an end-to-end learning of multiple generators via gating networks, which is responsible for choosing the appropriate generator network for a given condition. We adopt the categorical reparameterization trick for a categorical decision to be made in selecting a generator while maintaining the flow of the gradients. We demonstrate that individual generators learn different and salient subparts of the data and achieve a multiscale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) score of 0.2470 for CelebA and a competitive unsupervised inception score of 8.33 in CIFAR-10.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan
We propose the Wasserstein Auto-Encoder (WAE)---a new algorithm for building a generative model of the data distribution. WAE minimizes a penalized form of the Wasserstein distance between the model distribution and the target distribution, which leads to a different regularizer than the one used by the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). This regularizer encourages the encoded training distribution to match the prior. We compare our algorithm with several other techniques and show that it is a generalization of adversarial auto-encoders (AAE). Our experiments show that WAE shares many of the properties of VAEs (stable training, encoder-decoder architecture, nice latent manifold structure) while generating samples of better quality, as measured by the FID score.
Zero shot learning in Image Classification refers to the setting where images from some novel classes are absent in the training data but other information such as natural language descriptions or attribute vectors of the classes are available. This setting is important in the real world since one may not be able to obtain images of all the possible classes at training. While previous approaches have tried to model the relationship between the class attribute space and the image space via some kind of a transfer function in order to model the image space correspondingly to an unseen class, we take a different approach and try to generate the samples from the given attributes, using a conditional variational autoencoder, and use the generated samples for classification of the unseen classes. By extensive testing on four benchmark datasets, we show that our model outperforms the state of the art, particularly in the more realistic generalized setting, where the training classes can also appear at the test time along with the novel classes.
Unsupervised learning is of growing interest because it unlocks the potential held in vast amounts of unlabelled data to learn useful representations for inference. Autoencoders, a form of generative model, may be trained by learning to reconstruct unlabelled input data from a latent representation space. More robust representations may be produced by an autoencoder if it learns to recover clean input samples from corrupted ones. Representations may be further improved by introducing regularisation during training to shape the distribution of the encoded data in latent space. We suggest denoising adversarial autoencoders, which combine denoising and regularisation, shaping the distribution of latent space using adversarial training. We introduce a novel analysis that shows how denoising may be incorporated into the training and sampling of adversarial autoencoders. Experiments are performed to assess the contributions that denoising makes to the learning of representations for classification and sample synthesis. Our results suggest that autoencoders trained using a denoising criterion achieve higher classification performance, and can synthesise samples that are more consistent with the input data than those trained without a corruption process.