Application of Wasserstein GAN

When it was proposed that GAN uses Wasserstein distance as the training metric, GAN is usually seen as a transportation problem. Previously, it was mentioned in a previous post that GAN can be seen as a transportation problem, and because of that, some computation can be simplified by relating a kernel in the discriminator and the generator.

GAN can be used in word translation problem too. In a recent preprint in arXiv (refer to arXiv:1710.04087), Wasserstein GAN has been used to train a machine translation machine, given that there are no parallel data between the word embeddings between two languages. The translation mapping is seen as a generator, and the mapping is described using Wasserstein distance. The training objective is cross-domain similarity local scaling (CSLS). Their work has been performed in English-Russian and English-Chinese mappings.

It seems to work. Given GAN sometimes does not work for unknown reasons, it is an excitement that it works.

Capsules: Alternative to Pooling

Recently, Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues made the article about capsules available. He has been known to heavily criticize the use of pooling and back propagation.

“A capsule is a group of neurons whose activity vector represents the instantiation parameters of a specific type of entity such as an object or object part.” The nodes of inputs and outputs are vectors, instead of scalars as in neural networks. A cheat sheet comparing the traditional neurons and capsules is as follow:

Based on the capsule, the authors suggested a new type of layer called CapsNet.

Huadong Liao implemented CapsNet with TensorFlow according to the paper. (Refer to his repository.)