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A Probabilistic Representation of Deep Learning (arxiv.org)
1 point by joker3 on Aug 30, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A neural network can be rewritten as probability distributions: neurons set the energy, hidden layers become distributions, and the network updates beliefs from data. Some layers act as a starting guess and the rest as the fit to data, giving regularization that training can weaken.

Abstract

In this work, we introduce a novel probabilistic representation of deep learning, which provides an explicit explanation for the Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in three aspects: (i) neurons define the energy of a Gibbs distribution; (ii) the hidden layers of DNNs formulate Gibbs distributions; and (iii) the whole architecture of DNNs can be interpreted as a Bayesian neural network. Based on the proposed probabilistic representation, we investigate two fundamental properties of deep learning: hierarchy and generalization. First, we explicitly formulate the hierarchy property from the Bayesian perspective, namely that some hidden layers formulate a prior distribution and the remaining layers formulate a likelihood distribution. Second, we demonstrate that DNNs have an explicit regularization by learning a prior distribution and the learning algorithm is one reason for decreasing the generalization ability of DNNs. Moreover, we clarify two empirical phenomena of DNNs that cannot be explained by traditional theories of generalization. Simulation results validate the proposed probabilistic representation and the insights into these properties of deep learning based on a synthetic dataset.

Xinjie Lan, Kenneth E. Barner
arXiv:1908.09772 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Aug 26, 2019
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