Representation Learning in Sequence to Sequence Tasks: Multi-filter Gaussian Mixture Autoencoder

Heterogeneity of sentences exists in sequence to sequence tasks such as machine translation. Sentences with largely varied meanings or grammatical structures may increase the difficulty of convergence while training the network. In this paper, we introduce a model to resolve the heterogeneity in the sequence to sequence task. The Multi-filter Gaussian Mixture Autoencoder (MGMAE) utilizes an autoencoder to learn the representations of the inputs. The representations are the outputs from the encoder, lying in the latent space whose dimension is the hidden dimension of the encoder. The representations of training data in the latent space are used to train Gaussian mixtures. The latent space representations are divided into several mixtures of Gaussian distributions. A filter (decoder) is tuned to fit the data in one of the Gaussian distributions specifically. Each Gaussian is corresponding to one filter so that the filter is responsible for the heterogeneity within this Gaussian. Thus the heterogeneity of the training data can be resolved. Comparative experiments are conducted on the Geo-query dataset and English-French translation. Our experiments show that compares to the traditional encoder-decoder model, this network achieves better performance on sequence to sequence tasks such as machine translation and question answering.