General Stochastic Networks for Classification

We extend generative stochastic networks to supervised learning of representations. In particular, we introduce a hybrid training objective considering a generative and discriminative cost function governed by a trade-off parameter lambda. We use a new variant of network training involving noise injection, i.e. walkback training, to jointly optimize multiple network layers. Neither additional regularization constraints, such as l1, l2 norms or dropout variants, nor pooling- or convolutional layers were added. Nevertheless, we are able to obtain state-of-the-art performance on the MNIST dataset, without using permutation invariant digits and outperform baseline models on sub-variants of the MNIST and rectangles dataset significantly.