Learning Generative Models with Invariance to Symmetries

While imbuing a model with invariance to symmetries can improve data efficiency and predictive performance, most methods require specialised architectures and thus prior knowledge of the symmetries. Unfortunately, we don't always know what symmetries are present in the data. Recent work has solved this problem by jointly learning the invariance (or the degree of invariance) with the model from the data alone. But, this work has focused on discriminative models. We describe a method for learning invariant generative models. We demonstrate that our method can learn a generative model of handwritten digits that is invariant to rotation. We hope this line of work will enable more data-efficient deep generative models.