Evidence Transfer: Learning Improved Representations According to External Heterogeneous Task Outcomes

Abstract

Unsupervised representation learning tends to produce generic and reusable latent representations. However, these representations can often miss high-level features or semantic information, since they only observe the implicit properties of the dataset. On the other hand, supervised learning frameworks learn task-oriented latent representations that may not generalise in other tasks or domains. In this article, we introduce evidence transfer, a deep learning method that incorporates the outcomes of external tasks in the unsupervised learning process of an autoencoder. External task outcomes also referred to as categorical evidence, are represented by categorical variables, and are either directly or indirectly related to the primary dataset—in the most straightforward case they are the outcome of another task on the same dataset. Evidence transfer allows the manipulation of generic latent representations in order to include domain or task-specific knowledge that will aid their effectiveness in downstream tasks. Evidence transfer is robust against evidence of low quality and effective when introduced with related, corresponding, or meaningful evidence.