A Simultaneous Perturbation Weak Derivative Estimator for Stochastic Neural Networks

Abstract: In this paper we study gradient estimation for a network of nonlinear stochastic units known as the Little model. Many machine learning systems can be described as networks of homogeneous units, and the Little model is of a particularly general form, which includes as special cases several popular machine learning architectures. However, since a closed form solution for the stationary distribution is not known, gradient methods which work for similar models such as the Boltzmann machine or sigmoid belief network cannot be used. To address this we introduce a method to calculate derivatives for this system based on measure-valued differentiation and simultaneous perturbation. This extends previous works in which gradient estimation algorithms were presented for networks with restrictive features like symmetry or acyclic connectivity.