  In recent years, deep discriminative models have achieved extraordinary
performance on supervised learning tasks, significantly outperforming their
generative counterparts. However, their success relies on the presence of a
large amount of labeled data. How can one use the same discriminative models
for learning useful features in the absence of labels? We address this question
in this paper, by jointly modeling the distribution of data and latent features
in a manner that explicitly assigns zero probability to unobserved data. Rather
than maximizing the marginal probability of observed data, we maximize the
joint probability of the data and the latent features using a two step EM-like
procedure. To prevent the model from overfitting to our initial selection of
latent features, we use adversarial regularization. Depending on the task, we
allow the latent features to be one-hot or real-valued vectors and define a
suitable prior on the features. For instance, one-hot features correspond to
class labels and are directly used for the unsupervised and semi-supervised
classification task, whereas real-valued feature vectors are fed as input to
simple classifiers for auxiliary supervised discrimination tasks. The proposed
model, which we dub discriminative encoder (or DisCoder), is flexible in the
type of latent features that it can capture. The proposed model achieves
state-of-the-art performance on several challenging tasks.
