Self-supervised Disentanglement of Modality-specific and Shared Factors Improves Multimodal Generative Models

Abstract

Multimodal generative models learn a joint distribution over multiple modalities and thus have the potential to learn richer representations than unimodal models. However, current approaches are either inefficient in dealing with more than two modalities or fail to capture both modality-specific and shared variations. We introduce a new multimodal generative model that integrates both modality-specific and shared factors and aggregates shared information across any subset of modalities efficiently. Our method partitions the latent space into disjoint subspaces for modality-specific and shared factors and learns to disentangle these in a purely self-supervised manner. Empirically, we show improvements in representation learning and generative performance compared to previous methods and showcase the disentanglement capabilities.