A Better Way to Pretrain Deep Boltzmann Machines

We describe how the pre-training algorithm for Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBMs) is related to the pre-training algorithm for Deep Belief Networks and we show that under certain conditions, the pre-training procedure improves the variational lower bound of a two-hidden-layer DBM. Based on this analysis, we develop a different method of pre-training DBMs that distributes the modelling work more evenly over the hidden layers. Our results on the MNIST and NORB datasets demonstrate that the new pre-training algorithm allows us to learn better generative models. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.