In this study, we propose the integration of competitive learning into convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to improve the representation learning and efficiency of fine-tuning. Conventional CNNs use back propagation learning, and it enables powerful representation learning by a discrimination task. However, it requires huge amount of labeled data, and acquisition of labeled data is much harder than that of unlabeled data. Thus, efficient use of unlabeled data is getting crucial for DNNs. To address the problem, we introduce unsupervised competitive learning into the convolutional layer, and utilize unlabeled data for effective representation learning. The results of validation experiments using a toy model demonstrated that strong representation learning effectively extracted bases of images into convolutional filters using unlabeled data, and accelerated the speed of the fine-tuning of subsequent supervised back propagation learning. The leverage was more apparent when the number of filters was sufficiently large, and, in such a case, the error rate steeply decreased in the initial phase of fine-tuning. Thus, the proposed method enlarged the number of filters in CNNs, and enabled a more detailed and generalized representation. It could provide a possibility of not only deep but broad neural networks.
Current state-of-the-art classification and detection algorithms rely on supervised training. In this work we study unsupervised feature learning in the context of temporally coherent video data. We focus on feature learning from unlabeled video data, using the assumption that adjacent video frames contain semantically similar information. This assumption is exploited to train a convolutional pooling auto-encoder regularized by slowness and sparsity. We establish a connection between slow feature learning to metric learning and show that the trained encoder can be used to define a more temporally and semantically coherent metric. Complexity theory of circuits strongly suggests that deep architectures can be much more efficient (sometimes exponentially) than shallow architectures, in terms of computational elements required to represent some functions. Deep multi-layer neural networks have many levels of non-linearities allowing them to compactly represent highly non-linear and highly-varying functions. However, until recently it was not clear how to train such deep networks, since gradient-based optimization starting from random initialization appears to often get stuck in poor solutions. recently introduced a greedy layer-wise unsupervised learning algorithm for Deep Belief Networks (DBN), a generative model with many layers of hidden causal variables. In the context of the above optimization problem, we study this algorithm empirically and explore variants to better understand its success and extend it to cases where the inputs are continuous or where the structure of the input distribution is not revealing enough about the variable to be predicted in a supervised task. Our experiments also confirm the hypothesis that the greedy layer-wise unsupervised training strategy mostly helps the optimization, by initializing weights in a region near a good local minimum, giving rise to internal distributed representations that are high-level abstractions of the input, bringing better generalization. Abstract: In recent years, supervised learning with convolutional networks (CNNs) has seen huge adoption in computer vision applications. Comparatively, unsupervised learning with CNNs has received less attention. In this work we hope to help bridge the gap between the success of CNNs for supervised learning and unsupervised learning. We introduce a class of CNNs called deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGANs), that have certain architectural constraints, and demonstrate that they are a strong candidate for unsupervised learning. Training on various image datasets, we show convincing evidence that our deep convolutional adversarial pair learns a hierarchy of representations from object parts to scenes in both the generator and discriminator. Additionally, we use the learned features for novel tasks - demonstrating their applicability as general image representations.