Neurocomputing

Restricted Boltzmann Machines

Julien Vitay

Professur für Künstliche Intelligenz - Fakultät für Informatik

Restricted Boltzmann Machines

  • Auto-encoders are not the only feature extractors that can be stacked.
  • Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) are generative stochastic artificial neural networks that can learn a probability distribution of their inputs.

  • Their neurons form a bipartite graph with two groups of reciprocally connected units:

    • the visible units \mathbf{v} (the inputs)

    • the hidden units \mathbf{h} (the features or latent space).

  • Connections are bidirectional between \mathbf{v} and \mathbf{h}, but the neurons inside the two groups are independent from each other (restricted).

  • The goal of learning is to find the weights allowing the network to explain best the input data.

Restricted Boltzmann Machines

  • RBMs are a form of autoencoder where the input \rightarrow feature weight matrix is the same as the feature \rightarrow output matrix.

  • There are two steps:

    • The forward pass P(\mathbf{h} | \mathbf{x}) propagates the visible units activation to the hidden units.

    • The backward pass P(\mathbf{x} | \mathbf{h}) reconstructs the visible units from the the hidden units.

  • If the weight matrix is correctly chosen, the reconstructed input should “match” the original input: the data is explained.

Restricted Boltzmann Machines

  • The visible and units are generally binary units (0 or 1), with a probability defined by the weights and biases and the logistic function:

P(h_j = 1 | \mathbf{v}) = \sigma( \sum_i W_{ij} \, v_i + c_j)

P(v_i = 1 | \mathbf{h}) = \sigma(\sum_i W_{ji} \, h_j + b_i )

  • The weight matrix W and the biases \mathbf{b}, \mathbf{c} are the parameters \theta of a probability distribution over the activation of the visible and hidden units.
  • The goal is to find the parameters which explain best the data (visible units), i.e. the ones maximizing the log-likelihood of the model for the data (\mathbf{v}_1, \ldots, \mathbf{v}_N).

  • We use maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to maximize the log-likelihood of the model:

\max_{\theta} \, \mathcal{L}(\theta) = \mathbb{E}_{\mathbf{v} \sim \mathcal{D}} [ \log \, P_\theta(\mathbf{v}) ]

Restricted Boltzmann Machines

  • In practice, MLE is not tractable in a RBM, as we cannot estimate the joint probability P(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h}) of \mathbf{v} and \mathbf{h} (too many combinations are possible).

P(\mathbf{v}) = \sum_\mathbf{h} P(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h})

  • The main trick in energy-based models is to rewrite the probabilities using an energy function E(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h}):

P(\mathbf{v}) = \sum_\mathbf{h} P(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h}) = \dfrac{\sum_\mathbf{h} \exp^{-E(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h})}}{\sum_{\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h}} \exp^{-E(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h})}} = \dfrac{1}{Z} \sum_\mathbf{h} \exp^{-E(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h})}

where:

Z = \sum_{\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h}} \exp^{-E(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h})} = \sum_{\mathbf{v}} P(\mathbf{v}) \, \sum_{\mathbf{h}} \exp^{-E(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h})}

is the partition function (a normalizing term).

  • The probabilities come from a Gibbs distribution (or Boltzmann distribution) parameterized by the energy of the system. This is equivalent to a simple softmax over the energy…

Restricted Boltzmann Machines

  • Having reformulated the probabilities in terms of energy:

P(\mathbf{v}) = \frac{1}{Z} \sum_\mathbf{h} \exp^{-E(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h})}

we can introduce the free energy of the model for a sample \mathbf{v} (how surprising is the input \mathbf{v} for the model):

\mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}) = - \log \, \sum_\mathbf{h} \exp^{-E(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h})}

  • The log-likelihood of the model for a sample \mathbf{v} of the training data (\mathbf{v}_1, \ldots, \mathbf{v}_N) becomes:

\log \, P(\mathbf{v}) = \log \, \frac{1}{Z} \sum_\mathbf{h} \exp^{-E(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h})} = - \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}) + \log Z = - \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}) + \sum_{\mathbf{v}} P(\mathbf{v}) \, \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v})

  • Note that the second term sums over all possible inputs \mathbf{v}.

  • Maximizing the log-likelihood of the model on the training data can be done using gradient ascent by following this gradient:

\nabla_\theta \mathcal{L}(\theta) = \mathbb{E}_{\mathbf{v}} [\nabla_\theta \log \, P(\mathbf{v}_i)] = \mathbb{E}_{\mathbf{v}} [ - \nabla_\theta \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}) + \sum_{\mathbf{v}} P(\mathbf{v}) \nabla_\theta \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v})]

Restricted Boltzmann Machines

  • The free energy for a RBM with binary neurons is fortunately known analytically:

\mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}) = - \sum_i b_i \, v_i - \sum_j \log (1 + \exp^{\sum_i W_{ij} \, v_i + c_j})

so finding the gradient w.r.t \theta = (W, \mathbf{b}, \mathbf{c}) of the first term on the r.h.s (the free energy of the sample) is easy:

\nabla_\theta \log \, P(\mathbf{v}) = - \nabla_\theta \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}) + \sum_{\mathbf{v}} P(\mathbf{v}) \nabla_\theta \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v})

  • In particular, the gradient w.r.t the matrix W is the outer product between \mathbf{v} and P(\mathbf{h} | \mathbf{v}):

\nabla_W \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}) = - \mathbf{v} \times P(\mathbf{h} | \mathbf{v})

  • The problem is the second term: we would need to integrate over all possible values of the inputs \mathbf{v}, what is not tractable.

  • We will therefore make an approximation using Gibbs sampling (a variant of Monte-Carlo Markov Chain sampling - MCMC) to estimate that second term.

Gibbs sampling

  • Gibbs sampling consists of repeatedly applying the encoder P(\mathbf{h} | \mathbf{v}) and the decoder P(\mathbf{v} | \mathbf{h}) on the input.

    • We start by setting \mathbf{v}_0 = \mathbf{v} using a training sample.

    • We obtain \mathbf{h}_0 by computing P(\mathbf{h} | \mathbf{v}_0) and sampling it.

    • We obtain \mathbf{v}_1 by computing P(\mathbf{v} | \mathbf{h}_0) and sampling it.

    • We obtain \mathbf{v}_k by computing P(\mathbf{v} | \mathbf{h}_{k-1}) and sampling it.

  • After enough iterations k, we should have a good estimate of P(\mathbf{v}, \mathbf{h}).

  • The k iterations have generated enough reconstructions of \mathbf{v} to cover the distribution of \mathbf{v}.

Contrastive divergence

  • We set \mathbf{v}_0 = \mathbf{v} on a training sample and let Gibbs sampling iterate for k iterations until we obtain \mathbf{v}_k = \mathbf{v}^*.

  • Contrastive divergence (CD-k) shows that the gradient of the log-likelihood can be approximated by:

\begin{align} \nabla_W \log \, P(\mathbf{v}) & = - \nabla_W \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}) + \sum_{\mathbf{v}} P(\mathbf{v}) \nabla_W \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}) \\ & \approx \mathbf{v} \times P(\mathbf{h} | \mathbf{v}) - \mathbf{v}^* \times P(\mathbf{h} | \mathbf{v}^*) \\ \end{align}

  • The gradient of the log-likelihood is the difference between the initial explanation of \mathbf{v} by the model, and its explanation after k iterations (relaxation).

  • If the model is good, the reconstruction \mathbf{v}^* is the same as the input \mathbf{v}, so the gradient is zero.

  • An input \mathbf{v} is likely under the RBM model if it is able to reconstruct it, i.e. when it is not surprising (the free energy is low).

  • In practice, k=1 gives surprisingly good results, but RBMs are very painful to train (hyperparameters)…

Deep Belief Networks = stacked RBMs

  • A Deep Belief Network (DBM) is a simple stack of RBMS, trained using greedy layer-wise learning.

  • The “bottom” parts of the DBM become unidirectional when learning the top part.

Application: Finding cats on the internet

  • Andrew Ng and colleagues (Google, Stanford) used a similar technique to train a deep belief network on color images (200x200) taken from 10 million random unlabeled Youtube videos.

  • Each layer was trained greedily. They used a particular form of autoencoder called restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM) and a couple of other tricks (receptive fields, contrast normalization).

  • Training was distributed over 1000 machines (16.000 cores) and lasted for three days.

  • There was absolutely no task: the network just had to watch youtube videos.

  • After learning, they visualized what the neurons had learned.

Application: Finding cats on the internet

  • After training, some neurons had learned to respond uniquely to faces, or to cats, without ever having been instructed to.

  • The network can then be fine-tuned for classification tasks, improving the pre-AlexNet state-of-the-art on ImageNet by 70%.