Dear All,
I am trying to build a network where identical blocks are chained such that the next block uses the output of the previous one. Let me give an example.

Suppose, my block is a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with 10 inputs and single output, trained to solve regression problem.
There are 3 blocks in total.
The input is represented by 3x10 data matrix M.
The first MLP takes the first row M[0,:] of the data matrix as an input and produces the output z1.
The second MLP takes the second row M[1,:] except one entry (say, the 1st one). Instead, z1 value is used in place of omitted entry M[1,0]. This second MLP outputs z2.
The third MLP takes the third row except two entries (say, the 1st and 2nd ones). Instead, z1 and z2 values are used in place of omitted entries M[2,0] and M[2,1]. This third MLP outputs z3.


example_nn1024×653 165 KB

The architecture could be possibly implemented by means of LSTM network. However, the plan is to use many blocks in training time and just a single MLP block upon testing (prediction). The main requirement here: all MLP blocks must be identical. So, the questions:

How can I enforce all the blocks to have the same weights and biases during the training optimisation? One possible solution could be as follows: make a single step in gradient descent, then replace weights and biases by their means across all the blocks. How can I implement this procedure? Any better solution?
How can I connect the outputs of the previous blocks to the inputs of the subsequent ones bypassing certain entries in the input data matrix?
How can I simultaneously feed the outputs of the blocks into a loss function: Loss = (z1 - y1)**2 + (z2 - y2)**2 + (z3 - y3)**2, where y1, y2, y3 stand for the ground-truth values (labels).

I would greatly appreciate it, if someone kindly gives me a suggestion.