ALOPEX-B: A NEW, SIMPLER, BUT YET FASTER VERSION OF THE ALOPEX TRAINING ALGORITHM

Abstract

Experimenting with some changes and simplifications to the Alopex algorithm, we obtained a new faster version (Alopex-B), that also shows lower failure rates on training attempts. Like Alopex, our version is network-architecture independent, does not require error or transfer functions to be differentiable, has a high potential for parallelism, and is stochastic (which helps avoid local minima), but unlike Alopex it follows no annealing scheme, and uses less parameters which makes it simpler to implement and to use.