At present, the vast majority of building blocks, techniques, and architectures for deep learning are based on real-valued operations and representations. However, recent work on recurrent neural networks and older fundamental theoretical analysis suggests that complex numbers could have a richer representational capacity and could also facilitate noise-robust memory retrieval mechanisms. Despite their attractive properties and potential for opening up entirely new neural architectures, complex-valued deep neural networks have been marginalized due to the absence of the building blocks required to design such models. In this work, we provide the key atomic components for complex-valued deep neural networks and apply them to convolutional feed-forward networks and convolutional LSTMs. More precisely, we rely on complex convolutions and present algorithms for complex batch-normalization, complex weight initialization strategies for complex-valued neural nets and we use them in experiments with end-to-end training schemes. We demonstrate that such complex-valued models are competitive with their real-valued counterparts. We test deep complex models on several computer vision tasks, on music transcription using the MusicNet dataset and on Speech Spectrum Prediction using the TIMIT dataset. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on these audio-related tasks.
Using complex weights in neural networks also has biological motivation. @cite_14 have proposed a biologically plausible deep network that allows one to construct richer and more versatile representations using complex-valued neuronal units. The complex-valued formulation allows one to express the neuron’s output in terms of its firing rate and the relative timing of its activity. The amplitude of the complex neuron represents the former and its phase the latter. Input neurons that have similar phases are called as they add constructively, whereas neurons add destructively and thus interfere with each other. This is related to the gating mechanism used in both deep feed-forward neural networks and recurrent neural networks as this mechanism learns to synchronize inputs that the network propagates at a given feed-forward layer or time step. In the context of deep gating-based networks, synchronization means the propagation of inputs whose controlling gates simultaneously hold high values. These controlling gates are usually the activations of a sigmoid function. This ability to take into account phase information might explain the effectiveness of incorporating complex-valued representations in the context of recurrent neural networks.
@cite_14
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Deep learning has recently led to great successes in tasks such as image recognition (e.g , 2012). However, deep networks are still outmatched by the power and versatility of the brain, perhaps in part due to the richer neuronal computations available to cortical circuits. The challenge is to identify which neuronal mechanisms are relevant, and to find suitable abstractions to model them. Here, we show how aspects of spike timing, long hypothesized to play a crucial role in cortical information processing, could be incorporated into deep networks to build richer, versatile representations. We introduce a neural network formulation based on complex-valued neuronal units that is not only biologically meaningful but also amenable to a variety of deep learning frameworks. Here, units are attributed both a firing rate and a phase, the latter indicating properties of spike timing. We show how this formulation qualitatively captures several aspects thought to be related to neuronal synchrony, including gating of information processing and dynamic binding of distributed object representations. Focusing on the latter, we demonstrate the potential of the approach in several simple experiments. Thus, neuronal synchrony could be a flexible mechanism that fulfills multiple functional roles in deep networks.