Gromov-Wasserstein Autoencoders
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Abstract (arXiv)
Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based generative models offer flexible representation learning by incorporating meta-priors, general premises considered beneficial for downstream tasks. However, the incorporated meta-priors often involve ad-hoc model deviations from the original likelihood architecture, causing undesirable changes in their training. In this paper, we propose a novel representation learning method, Gromov-Wasserstein Autoencoders (GWAE), which directly matches the latent and data distributions using the variational autoencoding scheme. Instead of likelihood-based objectives, GWAE models minimize the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) metric between the trainable prior and given data distributions. The GW metric measures the distance structure-oriented discrepancy between distributions even with different dimensionalities, which provides a direct measure between the latent and data spaces. By restricting the prior family, we can introduce meta-priors into the latent space without changing their objective. The empirical comparisons with VAE-based models show that GWAE models work in two prominent meta-priors, disentanglement and clustering, with their GW objective unchanged.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 50 of its 89 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2022.
Builds on
50 of 89 references.
References · 50
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38 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3.
7 papers.
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- 2025Sparsification and Reconstruction from the Perspective of Representation Geometrycited by 0
- 2025Relation-Aware Slicing in Cross-Domain Alignmentcited by 0
- 2025TRANSPORTER: Transferring Visual Semantics from VLM Manifoldscited by 0
- 2025TRANSPORTER: Transferring Visual Semantics from VLM Manifolds23 Nov 2025
- 2025Relation-Aware Slicing in Cross-Domain Alignment17 Jul 2025
- 2025Sparsification and Reconstruction from the Perspective of Representation Geometry28 May 2025
- 2024Preventing Model Collapse in Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models2 Apr 2024
- 2023Monotone Generative Modeling via a Gromov-Monge Embedding2 Nov 2023
- 2023Scalable Optimal Transport Methods in Machine Learning: A Contemporary Survey8 May 2023
- 2023Simplex Autoencoders16 Jan 2023