Several recent advances to the state of the art in image classification benchmarks have come from better configurations of existing techniques rather than novel approaches to feature learning. Traditionally, hyper-parameter optimization has been the job of humans because they can be very efficient in regimes where only a few trials are possible. Presently, computer clusters and GPU processors make it possible to run more trials and we show that algorithmic approaches can find better results. We present hyper-parameter optimization results on tasks of training neural networks and deep belief networks (DBNs). We optimize hyper-parameters using random search and two new greedy sequential methods based on the expected improvement criterion. Random search has been shown to be sufficiently efficient for learning neural networks for several datasets, but we show it is unreliable for training DBNs. The sequential algorithms are applied to the most difficult DBN learning problems from [Larochelle et al., 2007] and find significantly better results than the best previously reported. This work contributes novel techniques for making response surface models P (y|x) in which many elements of hyper-parameter assignment (x) are known to be irrelevant given particular values of other elements.

Paraphrase detection is the task of examining two sentences and determining whether they have the same meaning. In order to obtain high accuracy on this task, thorough syntactic and semantic analysis of the two statements is needed. We introduce a method for paraphrase detection based on recursive autoencoders (RAE). Our unsupervised RAEs are based on a novel unfolding objective and learn feature vectors for phrases in syntactic trees. These features are used to measure the word-and phrase-wise similarity between two sentences. Since sentences may be of arbitrary length, the resulting matrix of similarity measures is of variable size. We introduce a novel dynamic pooling layer which computes a fixed-sized representation from the variable-sized matrices. The pooled representation is then used as input to a classifier. Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches onthe challenging MSRP paraphrase corpus.

We present a type of Temporal Restricted Boltzmann Machine that defines a probability distribution over an output sequence conditional on an input sequence. It shares the desirable properties of RBMs: efficient exact inference, an exponentially more expressive latent state than HMMs, and the ability to model nonlinear structure and dynamics. We apply our model to a challenging real-world graphics problem: facial expression transfer. Our results demonstrate improved performance over several baselines modeling high-dimensional 2D and 3D data.

Markov Random Fields (MRFs) have proven very powerful both as density estimators and feature extractors for classification. However, their use is often limited by an inability to estimate the partition function $Z$. In this paper, we exploit the gradient descent training procedure of restricted Boltzmann machines (a type of MRF) to {\bf track} the log partition function during learning. Our method relies on two distinct sources of information: (1) estimating the change $\Delta Z$ incurred by each gradient update, (2) estimating the difference in $Z$ over a small set of tempered distributions using bridge sampling. The two sources of information are then combined using an inference procedure similar to Kalman filtering. Learning MRFs through Tempered Stochastic Maximum Likelihood, we can estimate $Z$ using no more temperatures than are required for learning. Comparing to both exact values and estimates using annealed importance sampling (AIS), we show on several datasets that our method is able to accurately track the log partition function. In contrast to AIS, our method provides this estimate at each time-step, at a computational cost similar to that required for training alone.

We combine three important ideas present in previous work for building classifiers: thesemi-supervised hypothesis (the input distribution contains information about the classifier), the unsupervised manifold hypothesis (data density concentrates nearlow-dimensional manifolds), and the manifold hypothesis for classification (differentclasses correspond to disjoint manifolds separated by low density). We exploit a novel algorithm for capturing manifold structure (high-order contractive auto-encoders) and we show how it builds a topological atlas of charts, each chart being characterized by the principal singular vectors of the Jacobian of a representation mapping. This representation learning algorithm can be stacked to yield a deep architecture, and we combine it with a domain knowledge-free version of the TangentProp algorithm to encourage the classifier to be insensitive to local directions changes along the manifold. Record-breaking classification results are obtained.

The efficient coding hypothesis holds that neural receptive fields are adapted to the statistics of the environment, but is agnostic to the timescale of this adaptation, which occurs on both evolutionary and developmental timescales. In this work we focus on that component of adaptation which occurs during an organism's lifetime, and show that a number of unsupervised feature learning algorithms can account for features of normal receptive field properties across multiple primary sensory cortices. Furthermore, we show that the same algorithms account for altered receptive field properties in response to experimentally altered environmental statistics. Based on these modeling results we propose these models as phenomenological models of receptive field plasticity during an organism's lifetime. Finally, due to the success of the same models in multiple sensory areas, we suggest that these algorithms may provide a constructive realization of the theory, first proposed by Mountcastle (1978), that a qualitatively similar learning algorithm acts throughout primary sensory cortices.

Extracting good representations from images is essential for many computer Vision tasks.

It has been argued that perceptual multistability reflects probabilistic inference performed by the brain when sensory input is ambiguous. Alternatively, more traditional explanations of multistability refer to low-level mechanisms such as neuronal adaptation. We employ a Deep Boltzmann Machine (DBM) model of cortical processing to demonstrate that these two different approaches can be combined in the same framework. Based on recent developments in machine learning, we show how neuronal adaptation can be understood as a mechanism that improves probabilistic, sampling-based inference. Using the ambiguous Necker cube image, we analyze the perceptual switching exhibited by the model. We also examine the influence of spatial attention, and explore how binocular rivalry can be modeled with the same approach. Our work joins earlier studies in demonstrating how the principles underlying DBMs relate to cortical processing, and offers novel perspectives on the neural implementation of approximate probabilistic inference in the brain.

Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) extracts features representing the underlying causes of changes within a temporally coherent high-dimensional raw sensory input signal. Our novel incremental version of SFA (IncSFA) combines incremental Principal Components Analysis and Minor Components Analysis. Unlike standard batch-based SFA, IncSFA adapts along with non-stationary environments, is amenable to episodic training, is not corrupted by outliers, and is covariance-free. These properties make IncSFA a generally useful unsupervised preprocessor for autonomous learning agents and robots. In IncSFA, the CCIPCA and MCA updates take the form of Hebbian and anti-Hebbian updating, extending the biological plausibility of SFA. In both single node and deep network versions, IncSFA learns to encode its input streams (such as high-dimensional video) by informative slow features representing meaningful abstract environmental properties. It can handle cases where batch SFA fails.

This paper introduces a new specialized algorithm for equilibrium Monte Carlo sampling of binary-valued systems, which allows for large moves in the state space. This is achieved by constructing self-avoiding walks (SAWs) in the state space. As a consequence, many bits are flipped in a single MCMC step. We name the algorithm SARDONICS, an acronym for Self-Avoiding Random Dynamics on Integer Complex Systems. The algorithm has several free parameters, but we show that Bayesian optimization can be used to automatically tune them. SARDONICS performs remarkably well in a broad number of sampling tasks: toroidal ferromagnetic and frustrated Ising models, 3D Ising models, restricted Boltzmann machines and chimera graphs arising in the design of quantum computers.