Deep Energy: Using Energy Functions for Unsupervised Training of DNNs

The success of deep learning has been due in no small part to the availability of large annotated datasets. Thus, a major bottleneck in the current learning pipeline is the human annotation of data, which can be quite time consuming. For a given problem setting, we aim to circumvent this issue via the use of an externally specified energy function appropriate for that setting; we call this the "Deep Energy" approach. We show how to train a network on an entirely unlabelled dataset using such an energy function, and apply this general technique to learn CNNs for two specific tasks: seeded segmentation and image matting. Once the network parameters have been learned, we obtain a high-quality solution in a fast feed-forward style, without the need to repeatedly optimize the energy function for each image.