Predictive coding, precision and natural gradients
There is an increasing convergence between biologically plausible computational models of inference and learning with local update rules and the global gradient-based optimization of neural network models employed in machine learning. One particularly exciting connection is the correspondence between the locally informed optimization in predictive coding networks and the error backpropagation algorithm that is used to train state-of-the-art deep artificial neural networks. Here we focus on the related, but still largely under-explored connection between precision weighting in predictive coding networks and the Natural Gradient Descent algorithm for deep neural networks. Precision-weighted predictive coding is an interesting candidate for scaling up uncertainty-aware optimization -- particularly for models with large parameter spaces -- due to its distributed nature of the optimization process and the underlying local approximation of the Fisher information metric, the adaptive learning rate that is central to Natural Gradient Descent. Here, we show that hierarchical predictive coding networks with learnable precision indeed are able to solve various supervised and unsupervised learning tasks with performance comparable to global backpropagation with natural gradients and outperform their classical gradient descent counterpart on tasks where high amounts of noise are embedded in data or label inputs. When applied to unsupervised auto-encoding of image inputs, the deterministic network produces hierarchically organized and disentangled embeddings, hinting at the close connections between predictive coding and hierarchical variational inference.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Variational InferenceMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Predictive Coding with Bayesian Priors via Proximal Gradients
We recast predictive coding as continuous-time proximal gradient descent applied to a regularized maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) objective. We study first a single-level problem and then a multi-level hierarchy. For the sing…
PredProp: Bidirectional Stochastic Optimization with Precision Weighted Predictive Coding
We present PredProp, a method for optimization of weights and states in predictive coding networks (PCNs) based on the precision of propagated errors and neural activity. PredProp jointly addresses inference and learning…
DecoderStochastic OptimizationVariational InferenceError Optimization: Overcoming Exponential Signal Decay in Deep Predictive Coding Networks
Predictive Coding (PC) offers a biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation for neural network training, yet struggles with deeper architectures. This paper identifies the root cause: an inherent signal decay p…
Closed-form predictive coding via hierarchical Gaussian filters
Predictive coding (PC) offers a local and biologically grounded alternative to backpropagation in the training of artificial neural networks, yet to date, it remains slower, and performance degrades sharply as network de…
The Variational Predictive Natural Gradient
Variational inference transforms posterior inference into parametric optimization thereby enabling the use of latent variable models where otherwise impractical. However, variational inference can be finicky when differe…
General ClassificationVariational Inference