6,205 research outputs found
Emergence of Compositional Representations in Restricted Boltzmann Machines
Extracting automatically the complex set of features composing real
high-dimensional data is crucial for achieving high performance in
machine--learning tasks. Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) are empirically
known to be efficient for this purpose, and to be able to generate distributed
and graded representations of the data. We characterize the structural
conditions (sparsity of the weights, low effective temperature, nonlinearities
in the activation functions of hidden units, and adaptation of fields
maintaining the activity in the visible layer) allowing RBM to operate in such
a compositional phase. Evidence is provided by the replica analysis of an
adequate statistical ensemble of random RBMs and by RBM trained on the
handwritten digits dataset MNIST.Comment: Supplementary material available at the authors' webpag
Spiking neurons with short-term synaptic plasticity form superior generative networks
Spiking networks that perform probabilistic inference have been proposed both
as models of cortical computation and as candidates for solving problems in
machine learning. However, the evidence for spike-based computation being in
any way superior to non-spiking alternatives remains scarce. We propose that
short-term plasticity can provide spiking networks with distinct computational
advantages compared to their classical counterparts. In this work, we use
networks of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons that are trained to perform both
discriminative and generative tasks in their forward and backward information
processing paths, respectively. During training, the energy landscape
associated with their dynamics becomes highly diverse, with deep attractor
basins separated by high barriers. Classical algorithms solve this problem by
employing various tempering techniques, which are both computationally
demanding and require global state updates. We demonstrate how similar results
can be achieved in spiking networks endowed with local short-term synaptic
plasticity. Additionally, we discuss how these networks can even outperform
tempering-based approaches when the training data is imbalanced. We thereby
show how biologically inspired, local, spike-triggered synaptic dynamics based
simply on a limited pool of synaptic resources can allow spiking networks to
outperform their non-spiking relatives.Comment: corrected typo in abstrac
Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives
The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data
representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different
representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory
factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be
used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be
used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful
representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews
recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning,
covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning,
and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the
appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing
representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between
representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning
A Deterministic and Generalized Framework for Unsupervised Learning with Restricted Boltzmann Machines
Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are energy-based neural-networks which
are commonly used as the building blocks for deep architectures neural
architectures. In this work, we derive a deterministic framework for the
training, evaluation, and use of RBMs based upon the Thouless-Anderson-Palmer
(TAP) mean-field approximation of widely-connected systems with weak
interactions coming from spin-glass theory. While the TAP approach has been
extensively studied for fully-visible binary spin systems, our construction is
generalized to latent-variable models, as well as to arbitrarily distributed
real-valued spin systems with bounded support. In our numerical experiments, we
demonstrate the effective deterministic training of our proposed models and are
able to show interesting features of unsupervised learning which could not be
directly observed with sampling. Additionally, we demonstrate how to utilize
our TAP-based framework for leveraging trained RBMs as joint priors in
denoising problems
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