Neural random fields (NRFs), which are defined by using neural networks to implement potential functions in undirected models (sometimes known as energy-based models), provide an interesting family of model spaces for machine learning, besides various directed models such as generative adversarial networks (GANs). In this paper we propose a new approach, the inclusive-NRF approach, to learning NRFs for continuous data (e.g. images), by developing inclusive-divergence minimized auxiliary generators and stochastic gradient sampling. As demonstrations of how the new approach can be flexibly and effectively used, specific inclusive-NRF models are developed and thoroughly evaluated for a number of tasks - unsupervised supervised image generation, semi-supervised classification and anomaly detection. The proposed models consistently achieve strong experimental results in all these tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, in addition to superior sample generation, one fundamental additional benefit of our inclusive-NRF approach is that, unlike GANs, it directly provides (unnormalized) density estimate for sample evaluation. With these contributions and results, this paper significantly advances the learning and applications of undirected models to a new level, both theoretically and empirically, which have never been obtained before.
We introduce the "Energy-based Generative Adversarial Network" model (EBGAN) which views the discriminator as an energy function that attributes low energies to the regions near the data manifold and higher energies to other regions. Similar to the probabilistic GANs, a generator is seen as being trained to produce contrastive samples with minimal energies, while the discriminator is trained to assign high energies to these generated samples. Viewing the discriminator as an energy function allows to use a wide variety of architectures and loss functionals in addition to the usual binary classifier with logistic output. Among them, we show one instantiation of EBGAN framework as using an auto-encoder architecture, with the energy being the reconstruction error, in place of the discriminator. We show that this form of EBGAN exhibits more stable behavior than regular GANs during training. We also show that a single-scale architecture can be trained to generate high-resolution images. In this paper, we propose to equip Generative Adversarial Networks with the ability to produce direct energy estimates for samples. Specifically, we propose a flexible adversarial training framework, and prove this framework not only ensures the generator converges to the true data distribution, but also enables the discriminator to retain the density information at the global optimal. We derive the analytic form of the induced solution, and analyze the properties. In order to make the proposed framework trainable in practice, we introduce two effective approximation techniques. Empirically, the experiment results closely match our theoretical analysis, verifying the discriminator is able to recover the energy of data distribution. Training energy-based probabilistic models is confronted with apparently intractable sums, whose Monte Carlo estimation requires sampling from the estimated probability distribution in the inner loop of training. This can be approximately achieved by Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, but may still face a formidable obstacle that is the difficulty of mixing between modes with sharp concentrations of probability. Whereas an MCMC process is usually derived from a given energy function based on mathematical considerations and requires an arbitrarily long time to obtain good and varied samples, we propose to train a deep directed generative model (not a Markov chain) so that its sampling distribution approximately matches the energy function that is being trained. Inspired by generative adversarial networks, the proposed framework involves training of two models that represent dual views of the estimated probability distribution: the energy function (mapping an input configuration to a scalar energy value) and the generator (mapping a noise vector to a generated configuration), both represented by deep neural networks.