Replicated Softmax: an Undirected Topic Model

We introduce a two-layer undirected graphical model, called a "Replicated Softmax", that can be used to model and automatically extract low-dimensional latent semantic representations from a large unstructured collection of documents. We present efficient learning and inference algorithms for this model, and show how a Monte-Carlo based method, Annealed Importance Sampling, can be used to produce an accurate estimate of the log-probability the model assigns to test data. This allows us to demonstrate that the proposed model is able to generalize much better compared to Latent Dirichlet Allocation in terms of both the log-probability of held-out documents and the retrieval accuracy.