The quest for biologically plausible deep learning is driven, not just by the desire to explain experimentally-observed properties of biological neural networks, but also by the hope of discovering more efficient methods for training artificial networks. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm named Variational Probably Flow (VPF), an extension of minimum probability flow for training binary Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBMs). We show that weight updates in VPF are local, depending only on the states and firing rates of the adjacent neurons. Unlike contrastive divergence, there is no need for Gibbs confabulations; and unlike backpropagation, alternating feedforward and feedback phases are not required. Moreover, the learning algorithm is effective for training DBMs with intra-layer connections between the hidden nodes. Experiments with MNIST and Fashion MNIST demonstrate that VPF learns reasonable features quickly, reconstructs corrupted images more accurately, and generates samples with a high estimated log-likelihood. Lastly, we note that, interestingly, if an asymmetric version of VPF exists, the weight updates directly explain experimental results in Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP).
We compare VPF with existing methods to train RBMs or DBMs. The differences between VPF and CD are: (1) VPF has an explicit objective function, (2) VPF does not require Gibbs sampling to generate confabulations to compute the gradient, (3) VPF gives rise to STDP. As for training DBMs, instead of employing a two-stage process, i.e., pre-training a stack of RBMs or a separate recognition model to initialize a DBM and then updating it @cite_7 @cite_8 , VPF learns all the parameters simultaneously without greedy layer-wise initialization of the weights and does not require data confabulations. Moreover, VPF trains neural nets with intra-layer connections, which is hard to achieve in conventional methods.
@cite_7 @cite_8
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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. We present a new approximate inference algorithm for Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBM’s), a generative model with many layers of hidden variables. The algorithm learns a separate “recognition” model that is used to quickly initialize, in a single bottom-up pass, the values of the latent variables in all hidden layers. We show that using such a recognition model, followed by a combined top-down and bottom-up pass, it is possible to efficiently learn a good generative model of high-dimensional highly-structured sensory input. We show that the additional computations required by incorporating a top-down feedback plays a critical role in the performance of a DBM, both as a generative and discriminative model. Moreover, inference is only at most three times slower compared to the approximate inference in a Deep Belief Network (DBN), making large-scale learning of DBM’s practical. Finally, we demonstrate that the DBM’s trained using the proposed approximate inference algorithm perform well compared to DBN’s and SVM’s on the MNIST handwritten digit, OCR English letters, and NORB visual object recognition tasks.