Learning in Markov Random Fields with Contrastive Free Energies

Learning Markov random field (MRF) models is notoriously hard due to the presence of a global normalization factor. In this paper we present a new framework for learning MRF models based on the contrastive free energy (CF) objective function. In this scheme the parameters are updated in an attempt to match the average statistics of the data distribution and a distribution which is (partially or approximately) "relaxed" to the equilibrium distribution. We show that maximum likelihood, mean field, contrastive divergence and pseudo-likelihood objectives can be understood in this paradigm. Moreover, we propose and study a new learning algorithm: the "kstep Kikuchi/Bethe approximation". This algorithm is then tested on a conditional random field model with "skip-chain" edges to model long range interactions in text data. It is demonstrated that with no loss in accuracy, the training time is brought down on average from 19 hours (BP based learning) to 83 minutes, an order of magnitude improvement

Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines for Structured Output Prediction

Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines (CRBMs) are rich probabilistic models that have recently been applied to a wide range of problems, including collaborative filtering, classification, and modeling motion capture data. While much progress has been made in training non-conditional RBMs, these algorithms are not applicable to conditional models and there has been almost no work on training and generating predictions from conditional RBMs for structured output problems. We first argue that standard Contrastive Divergence-based learning may not be suitable for training CRBMs. We then identify two distinct types of structured output prediction problems and propose an improved learning algorithm for each. The first problem type is one where the output space has arbitrary structure but the set of likely output configurations is relatively small, such as in multi-label classification. The second problem is one where the output space is arbitrarily structured but where the output space variability is much greater, such as in image denoising or pixel labeling. We show that the new learning algorithms can work much better than Contrastive Divergence on both types of problems

Efficient Learning for Undirected Topic Models

Replicated Softmax model, a well-known undirected topic model, is powerful in extracting semantic representations of documents. Traditional learning strategies such as Contrastive Divergence are very inefficient. This paper provides a novel estimator to speed up the learning based on Noise Contrastive Estimate, extended for documents of variant lengths and weighted inputs. Experiments on two benchmarks show that the new estimator achieves great learning efficiency and high accuracy on document retrieval and classification.Comment: Accepted by ACL-IJCNLP 2015 short paper. 6 page

A note on the evaluation of generative models

Probabilistic generative models can be used for compression, denoising, inpainting, texture synthesis, semi-supervised learning, unsupervised feature learning, and other tasks. Given this wide range of applications, it is not surprising that a lot of heterogeneity exists in the way these models are formulated, trained, and evaluated. As a consequence, direct comparison between models is often difficult. This article reviews mostly known but often underappreciated properties relating to the evaluation and interpretation of generative models with a focus on image models. In particular, we show that three of the currently most commonly used criteria---average log-likelihood, Parzen window estimates, and visual fidelity of samples---are largely independent of each other when the data is high-dimensional. Good performance with respect to one criterion therefore need not imply good performance with respect to the other criteria. Our results show that extrapolation from one criterion to another is not warranted and generative models need to be evaluated directly with respect to the application(s) they were intended for. In addition, we provide examples demonstrating that Parzen window estimates should generally be avoided