A Constrained Latent Variable Model

Abstract

Latent variable models provide valuable compact representations for learning and inference in many computer vision tasks. However, most existing models cannot directly encode prior knowledge about the specific problem at hand. In this paper, we introduce a constrained latent variable model whose generated output inherently accounts for such knowledge. To this end, we propose an approach that explicitly imposes equality and inequality constraints on the model's output during learning, thus avoiding the computational burden of having to account for these constraints at inference. Our learning mechanism can exploit non-linear kernels, while only involving sequential closed-form updates of the model parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our constrained latent variable model on the problem of non-rigid 3D reconstruction from monocular images, and show that it yields qualitative and quantitative improvements over several baselines.