Hierarchical Disentangle Network for Object Representation Learning

An object can be described as the combination of primary visual attributes. Disentangling such underlying primitives is the long objective of representation learning. It is observed that categories have the natural multi-granularity or hierarchical characteristics, i.e. any two objects can share some common primitives in a particular category granularity while they may possess their unique ones in another granularity. However, previous works usually operate in a flat manner (i.e. in a particular granularity) to disentangle the representations of objects. Though they may obtain the primitives to constitute objects as the categories in that granularity, their results are obviously not efficient and complete. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical disentangle network (HDN) to exploit the rich hierarchical characteristics among categories to divide the disentangling process in a coarse-to-fine manner, such that each level only focuses on learning the specific representations in its granularity and finally the common and unique representations in all granularities jointly constitute the raw object. Specifically, HDN is designed based on an encoder-decoder architecture. To simultaneously ensure the disentanglement and interpretability of the encoded representations, a novel hierarchical generative adversarial network (GAN) is elaborately designed. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on four object datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.