Sample and Predict Your Latent: Modality-free Sequential Disentanglement
  via Contrastive Estimation
Ilan Naiman Nimrod Berman Omri Azencot
Unsupervised disentanglement is a long-standing challenge in representation
learning. Recently, self-supervised techniques achieved impressive results in
the sequential setting, where data is time-dependent. However, the latter
methods employ modality-based data augmentations and random sampling or solve
auxiliary tasks. In this work, we propose to avoid that by generating,
sampling, and comparing empirical distributions from the underlying variational
model. Unlike existing work, we introduce a self-supervised sequential
disentanglement framework based on contrastive estimation with no external
signals, while using common batch sizes and samples from the latent space
itself. In practice, we propose a unified, efficient, and easy-to-code sampling
strategy for semantically similar and dissimilar views of the data. We evaluate
our approach on video, audio, and time series benchmarks. Our method presents
state-of-the-art results in comparison to existing techniques. The code is
available at https://github.com/azencot-group/SPYL.