Improved learning of gaussian-bernoulli restricted boltzmann machines

Abstract. We propose a few remedies to improve training of Gaussian-Bernoulli restricted Boltzmann machines (GBRBM), which is known to be difficult. Firstly, we use a different parameterization of the energy function, which allows for more intuitive interpretation of the parameters and facilitates learning. Secondly, we propose parallel tempering learning for GBRBM. Lastly, we use an adaptive learning rate which is selected automatically in order to stabilize training. Our ex-tensive experiments show that the proposed improvements indeed remove most of the difficulties encountered when training GBRBMs using conventional methods