Latent Variable Models (LVM), like the Shared-GPLVM
and the Spectral Latent Variable Model, help mitigate over-
fitting when learning discriminative methods from small or
moderately sized training sets. Nevertheless, existing meth-
ods suffer from several problems: 1) complexity; 2) the
lack of explicit mappings to and from the latent space; 3)
an inability to cope with multi-modality; and 4) the lack
of a well-defined density over the latent space. We pro-
pose a LVM called the Shared Kernel Information Em-
bedding (sKIE). It defines a coherent density over a latent
space and multiple input/output spaces (e.g., image features
and poses), and it is easy to condition on a latent state,
or on combinations of the input/output states. Learning
is quadratic, and it works well on small datasets. With
datasets too large to learn a coherent global model, one
can use sKIE to learn local online models. sKIE permits
missing data during inference, and partially labelled data
durin...
David J. Fleet, Leonid Sigal, Roland Memisevic