Deep Adversarial Belief Networks

Abstract: We present a novel adversarial framework for training deep belief networks (DBNs), which includes replacing the generator network in the methodology of generative adversarial networks (GANs) with a DBN and developing a highly parallelizable numerical algorithm for training the resulting architecture in a stochastic manner. Unlike the existing techniques, this framework can be applied to the most general form of DBNs with no requirement for back propagation. As such, it lays a new foundation for developing DBNs on a par with GANs with various regularization units, such as pooling and normalization. Foregoing back-propagation, our framework also exhibits superior scalability as compared to other DBN and GAN learning techniques. We present a number of numerical experiments in computer vision as well as neurosciences to illustrate the main advantages of our approach.