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