Top-Down Regularization of Deep Belief Networks

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2013)

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Authors

Hanlin Goh, Nicolas Thome, Matthieu Cord, Joo-Hwee Lim

Abstract

Designing a principled and effective algorithm for learning deep architectures is a challenging problem. The current approach involves two training phases: a fully unsupervised learning followed by a strongly discriminative optimization. We suggest a deep learning strategy that bridges the gap between the two phases, resulting in a three-phase learning procedure. We propose to implement the scheme using a method to regularize deep belief networks with top-down information. The network is constructed from building blocks of restricted Boltzmann machines learned by combining bottom-up and top-down sampled signals. A global optimization procedure that merges samples from a forward bottom-up pass and a top-down pass is used. Experiments on the MNIST dataset show improvements over the existing algorithms for deep belief networks. Object recognition results on the Caltech-101 dataset also yield competitive results.