- Geoffrey Hinton gives a tutorial on deep belief nets and how to learn multi-layer generative models of unlabeled data by learning one layer of features at a time using restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs).
- RBMs make it possible to efficiently learn deep generative models one layer at a time by approximating the intractable posterior distribution over hidden units given visible data.
- Layer-by-layer unsupervised pre-training of features followed by discriminative fine-tuning improves classification performance on benchmark datasets like MNIST compared to backpropagation alone.