Improve deep learning with unsupervised objective

Citation

Zhang S, Huang K, Zhang R & Hussain A (2017) Improve deep learning with unsupervised objective. In: Liu D, Xie S, Li Y, Zhao D & El-Alfy E (eds.) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 10634. 24th International Conference On Neural Information Processing: ICONIP 2017, Guangzhou, China, 14.11.2017-18.11.2017. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 720-728. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70087-8_74

Abstract
We propose a novel approach capable of embedding the unsupervised objective into hidden layers of the deep neural network (DNN) for preserving important unsupervised information. To this end, we exploit a very simple yet effective unsupervised method, i.e. principal component analysis (PCA), to generate the unsupervised “label" for the latent layers of DNN. Each latent layer of DNN can then be supervised not just by the class label, but also by the unsupervised “label" so that the intrinsic structure information of data can be learned and embedded. Compared with traditional methods which combine supervised and unsupervised learning, our proposed model avoids the needs for layer-wise pre-training and complicated model learning e.g. in deep autoencoder. We show that the resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance in both face and handwriting data simply with learning of unsupervised “labels".

Keywords
Deep learning; Multi-layer perceptron; Unsupervised learning; Recognition