3,677 research outputs found
Muprop: Unbiased backpropagation for stochastic neural networks
This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from International Conference on Learning Representations via http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05176v3Deep neural networks are powerful parametric models that can be trained efficiently using the backpropagation algorithm. Stochastic neural networks combine the power of large parametric functions with that of graphical models, which makes it possible to learn very complex distributions. However, as backpropagation is not directly applicable to stochastic networks that include discrete sampling operations within their computational graph, training such networks remains difficult. We present MuProp, an unbiased gradient estimator for stochastic networks, designed to make this task easier. MuProp improves on the likelihood-ratio estimator by reducing its variance using a control variate based on the first-order Taylor expansion of a mean-field network. Crucially, unlike prior attempts at using backpropagation for training stochastic networks, the resulting estimator is unbiased and well behaved. Our experiments on structured output prediction and discrete latent variable modeling demonstrate that MuProp yields consistently good performance across a range of difficult tasks.ALTA; Jesus College Cambridge; Cambridge-Tubingen PhD Fellowshi
Deep AutoRegressive Networks
We introduce a deep, generative autoencoder capable of learning hierarchies
of distributed representations from data. Successive deep stochastic hidden
layers are equipped with autoregressive connections, which enable the model to
be sampled from quickly and exactly via ancestral sampling. We derive an
efficient approximate parameter estimation method based on the minimum
description length (MDL) principle, which can be seen as maximising a
variational lower bound on the log-likelihood, with a feedforward neural
network implementing approximate inference. We demonstrate state-of-the-art
generative performance on a number of classic data sets: several UCI data sets,
MNIST and Atari 2600 games.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML), Beijing, China, 201
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