Learning Deep Structured Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method combining Markov random fields with deep learning to jointly learn structured models and deep features, improving prediction accuracy in complex tasks.

Contribution

It presents an efficient training algorithm that integrates learning and inference for deep structured models with GPU acceleration.

Findings

Significant performance improvements in word prediction from noisy images.

Enhanced multi-class classification accuracy on Flickr photographs.

Effective joint learning of deep features and MRF parameters.

Abstract

Many problems in real-world applications involve predicting several random variables which are statistically related. Markov random fields (MRFs) are a great mathematical tool to encode such relationships. The goal of this paper is to combine MRFs with deep learning algorithms to estimate complex representations while taking into account the dependencies between the output random variables. Towards this goal, we propose a training algorithm that is able to learn structured models jointly with deep features that form the MRF potentials. Our approach is efficient as it blends learning and inference and makes use of GPU acceleration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in the tasks of predicting words from noisy images, as well as multi-class classification of Flickr photographs. We show that joint learning of the deep features and the MRF parameters results in significant performance gains.