用可微分滤波学习隐马尔可夫模型,更快更准地恢复参数。
Differentiable Filtering for Learning Hidden Markov Models
- 将前向滤波建模为结构化神经网络,通过梯度下降优化参数。
- 在合成数据上收敛速度超Baum-Welch,且在欠完备与过完备场景均有效。
- 参数可解释性强,适合需要透明性的序列建模任务。
隐马尔可夫模型(HMM)是建模序列数据的基础工具,但从未观测数据中学习其参数仍具挑战性。经典方法如Baum-Welch算法计算量大且易陷入局部最优,而现代谱方法虽有理论保证,但可能产生无效的概率输出。本文提出Belief Net,一种可微分滤波框架,将前向滤波形式化为结构化神经网络,并通过随机梯度下降进行优化。该架构递归更新信念状态,即基于观测历史的隐藏状态后验分布。与黑箱变压器模型不同,Belief Net的可学习权重明确对应初始分布、转移矩阵和发射矩阵的对数几率,确保完全可解释性。模型采用仅解码器(因果)架构处理观测序列,使用标准自回归下一个观测预测损失端到端训练。在合成HMM数据上,Belief Net比Baum-Welch收敛更快,并成功恢复了欠完备与过完备设置下的参数,而谱方法在后者表现不佳。真实语言数据上的变压器模型对比也进行了展示。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are fundamental for modeling sequential data, yet learning their parameters from observations remains challenging. Classical methods like the Baum-Welch algorithm are computationally intensive and prone to local optima, while modern spectral algorithms offer provable guarantees but may produce probability outputs outside valid ranges. This work introduces Belief Net, a differentiable filtering framework that learns HMM parameters by formulating the forward filter as a structured neural network and optimizing it with stochastic gradient descent. This architecture recursively updates the belief state, which represents the posterior probability distribution over hidden states based on the observation history. Unlike black-box transformer models, Belief Net's learnable weights are explicitly the logits of the initial distribution, transition matrix, and emission matrix, ensuring full interpretability. The model processes observation sequences using a decoder-only (causal) architecture and is trained end-to-end with standard autoregressive next-observation prediction loss. On synthetic HMM data, Belief Net achieves faster convergence than Baum-Welch while successfully recovering parameters in both undercomplete and overcomplete settings, whereas spectral methods prove ineffective in the latter. Comparisons with transformer-based models are also presented on real-world language data.
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