Helmholtz Machines (HMs) are a class of generative models composed of two Sigmoid Belief Networks (SBNs), acting respectively as an encoder and a decoder. These models are commonly trained using a two-step optimization algorithm called Wake-Sleep (WS) and more recently by improved versions, such as Reweighted Wake-Sleep (RWS) and Bidirectional Helmholtz Machines (BiHM). The locality of the connections in an SBN induces sparsity in the Fisher Information Matrices associated to the probabilistic models, in the form of a finely-grained block-diagonal structure.
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