Some similarities and differences from DNNs
- Both use gradient-descent based learning procedures for minimizing cost functions
- Energy based models don't use backpropagation and automatic differentiation for computing gradients, instead turning to Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods.
- DNNs often have several hidden layers. A restricted Boltzmann machine has only one hidden layer, however several RBMs can be stacked to make up Deep Belief Networks, of which they constitute the building blocks.
History: The RBM was developed by amongst others Geoffrey Hinton, called by some the "Godfather of Deep Learning", working with the University of Toronto and Google.