The backpropagation algorithm has long been the canonical training method for neural networks. Modern paradigms are implicitly optimized for it, and numerous guidelines exist to ensure its proper use. Recently, synthetic gradients methods -where the error gradient is only roughly approximated - have garnered interest. These methods not only better portray how biological brains are learning, but also open new computational possibilities, such as updating layers asynchronously. Even so, they have failed to scale past simple tasks like MNIST or CIFAR-10. This is in part due to a lack of standards, leading to ill-suited models and practices forbidding such methods from performing to the best of their abilities. In this work, we focus on direct feedback alignment and present a set of best practices justified by observations of the alignment angles. We characterize a bottleneck effect that prevents alignment in narrow layers, and hypothesize it may explain why feedback alignment methods have yet to scale to large convolutional networks.
A number of such methods have focused on enhanced biological realism. Boltzmann machine learning @cite_1 , Contrastive Hebbian Learning @cite_3 , and Generalized Recirculation @cite_22 all use local learning signals that do not require propagation of a gradient through the network.
@cite_1 @cite_22 @cite_3
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We present a new learning algorithm for Boltzmann machines that contain many layers of hidden variables. Data-dependent expectations are estimated using a variational approximation that tends to focus on a single mode, and dataindependent expectations are approximated using persistent Markov chains. The use of two quite different techniques for estimating the two types of expectation that enter into the gradient of the log-likelihood makes it practical to learn Boltzmann machines with multiple hidden layers and millions of parameters. The learning can be made more efficient by using a layer-by-layer “pre-training” phase that allows variational inference to be initialized with a single bottomup pass. We present results on the MNIST and NORB datasets showing that deep Boltzmann machines learn good generative models and perform well on handwritten digit and visual object recognition tasks. Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) are widely used as building blocks for deep learning models. Learning typically proceeds by using stochastic gradient descent, and the gradients are estimated with sampling methods. However, the gradient estimation is a computational bottleneck, so better use of the gradients will speed up the descent algorithm. To this end, we rst derive upper bounds on the RBM cost function, then show that descent methods can have natural advantages by operating in the‘1 and Shatten1 norm. We introduce a new method called Spectral Descent" that updates parameters in the normed space. Empirical results show dramatic improvements over stochastic gradient descent, and have only have a fractional increase on the per-iteration cost. We present a distribution model for binary vectors, called the influence combination model and show how this model can be used as the basis for unsupervised learning algorithms for feature selection. The model can be represented by a particular type of Boltzmann machine with a bipartite graph structure that we call the combination machine. This machine is closely related to the Harmonium model defined by Smolensky. In the first part of the paper we analyze properties of this distribution representation scheme. We show that arbitrary distributions of binary vectors can be approximated by the combination model. We show how the weight vectors in the model can be interpreted as high order correlation patterns among the input bits, and how the combination machine can be used as a mechanism for detecting these patterns. We compare the combination model with the mixture model and with principle component analysis. In the second part of the paper we present two algorithms for learning the combination model from examples. The first learning algorithm is the standard gradient ascent heuristic for computing maximum likelihood estimates for the parameters of the model. Here we give a closed form for this gradient that is significantly easier to compute than the corresponding gradient for the general Boltzmann machine. The second learning algorithm is a greedy method that creates the hidden units and computes their weights one at a time. This method is a variant of projection pursuit density estimation. In the third part of the paper we give experimental results for these learning methods on synthetic data and on natural data of handwritten digit images. While Boltzmann Machines have been successful at unsupervised learning and density modeling of images and speech data, they can be very sensitive to noise in the data. In this paper, we introduce a novel model, the Robust Boltzmann Machine (RoBM), which allows Boltzmann Machines to be robust to corruptions. In the domain of visual recognition, the RoBM is able to accurately deal with occlusions and noise by using multiplicative gating to induce a scale mixture of Gaussians over pixels. Image denoising and in-painting correspond to posterior inference in the RoBM. Our model is trained in an unsupervised fashion with unlabeled noisy data and can learn the spatial structure of the occluders. Compared to standard algorithms, the RoBM is significantly better at recognition and denoising on several face databases.