On the quantitative analysis of Deep Belief Networks

Deep Belief Networks (DBN’s) are generative models that contain many layers of hidden variables. Efficient greedy algorithms for learning and approximate inference have allowed these models to be applied successfully in many application domains. The main building block of a DBN is a bipartite undirected graphical model called a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). Due to the presence of the partition function, model selection, complexity control, and exact maximum likelihood learning in RBM's are intractable. We show that Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) can be used to efficiently estimate the partition function of an RBM, and we present a novel AIS scheme for comparing RBM's with different architectures. We further show how an AIS estimator, along with approximate inference, can be used to estimate a lower bound on the log-probability that a DBN model with multiple hidden layers assigns to the test data. This is, to our knowledge, the first step towards obtaining quantitative results that would allow us to directly assess the performance of Deep Belief Networks as generative models of data

Relaxations for inference in restricted Boltzmann machines

We propose a relaxation-based approximate inference algorithm that samples near-MAP configurations of a binary pairwise Markov random field. We experiment on MAP inference tasks in several restricted Boltzmann machines. We also use our underlying sampler to estimate the log-partition function of restricted Boltzmann machines and compare against other sampling-based methods.Comment: ICLR 2014 workshop track submissio

Metric-Free Natural Gradient for Joint-Training of Boltzmann Machines

This paper introduces the Metric-Free Natural Gradient (MFNG) algorithm for training Boltzmann Machines. Similar in spirit to the Hessian-Free method of Martens [8], our algorithm belongs to the family of truncated Newton methods and exploits an efficient matrix-vector product to avoid explicitely storing the natural gradient metric $L$. This metric is shown to be the expected second derivative of the log-partition function (under the model distribution), or equivalently, the variance of the vector of partial derivatives of the energy function. We evaluate our method on the task of joint-training a 3-layer Deep Boltzmann Machine and show that MFNG does indeed have faster per-epoch convergence compared to Stochastic Maximum Likelihood with centering, though wall-clock performance is currently not competitive

Accelerating sparse restricted Boltzmann machine training using non-Gaussianity measures

In recent years, sparse restricted Boltzmann machines have gained popularity as unsupervised feature extractors. Starting from the observation that their training process is biphasic, we investigate how it can be accelerated: by determining when it can be stopped based on the non-Gaussianity of the distribution of the model parameters, and by increasing the learning rate when the learnt filters have locked on to their preferred configurations. We evaluated our approach on the CIFAR-10, NORB and GTZAN datasets