Bi-GAE: A Bidirectional Generative Auto-Encoder

Improving the generative and representational capabilities of auto-encoders is a hot research topic. However, it is a challenge to jointly and simultaneously optimize the bidirectional mapping between the encoder and the decoder/generator while ensuing convergence. Most existing auto-encoders cannot automatically trade off bidirectional mapping. In this work, we propose Bi-GAE, an unsupervised bidirectional generative auto-encoder based on bidirectional generative adversarial network (BiGAN). First, we introduce two terms that enhance information expansion in decoding to follow human visual models and to improve semantic-relevant feature representation capability in encoding. Furthermore, we embed a generative adversarial network (GAN) to improve representation while ensuring convergence. The experimental results show that Bi-GAE achieves competitive results in both generation and representation with stable convergence. Compared with its counterparts, the representational power of Bi-GAE improves the classification accuracy of high-resolution images by about 8.09\% . In addition, Bi-GAE increases structural similarity index measure (SSIM) by 0.045 , and decreases Fréchet inception distance (FID) by 2.48 in the reconstruction of 512\times 512 images.