Recovering manifold representations via unsupervised meta-learning

Manifold representation learning holds great promise for theoretical understanding and characterization of deep neural networks' behaviors through the lens of geometries. However, data scarcity remains a major challenge in manifold analysis especially for data and applications with real-world complexity. To address this issue, we propose manifold representation meta-learning (MRML) based on autoencoders to recover the underlying manifold structures without uniformly or densely sampled data. Specifically, we adopt episodic training, following model agnostic meta-learning, to meta-learn autoencoders that are generalizable to unseen samples specifically corresponding to regions with low-sampling density. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MRML via empirical experiments on LineMOD, a dataset curated for 6-D object pose estimation. We also apply topological metrics based on persistent homology and neighborhood graphs for quantitative assessment of manifolds reconstructed by MRML. In comparison to state-of-the-art baselines, our proposed approach demonstrates improved manifold reconstruction better matching the data manifold by preserving prominent topological features and relative proximity of samples.