69,105 research outputs found
Neural Mechanisms for Information Compression by Multiple Alignment, Unification and Search
This article describes how an abstract framework for perception and cognition may be realised in terms of neural mechanisms and neural processing.
This framework — called information compression by multiple alignment, unification and search (ICMAUS) — has been developed in previous research as a generalized model of any system for processing information, either natural or
artificial. It has a range of applications including the analysis and production of natural language, unsupervised inductive learning, recognition of objects and patterns, probabilistic reasoning, and others. The proposals in this article may be seen as an extension and development of
Hebb’s (1949) concept of a ‘cell assembly’.
The article describes how the concept of ‘pattern’ in the ICMAUS framework may be mapped onto a version of the cell
assembly concept and the way in which neural mechanisms may achieve the effect of ‘multiple alignment’ in the ICMAUS framework.
By contrast with the Hebbian concept of a cell assembly, it is proposed here that any one neuron can belong in one assembly and only one assembly. A key feature of present proposals, which is not part of the Hebbian concept, is that any cell assembly may contain ‘references’ or ‘codes’ that serve to identify one or more other cell assemblies. This mechanism allows information to be stored in a compressed form, it provides a robust mechanism by which assemblies may be connected to form hierarchies and other kinds of structure, it means that assemblies can express
abstract concepts, and it provides solutions to some of the other problems associated with cell assemblies.
Drawing on insights derived from the ICMAUS framework, the article also describes how learning may be achieved with neural mechanisms. This concept of learning is significantly different from the Hebbian concept and appears to provide a better account of what we know about human learning
A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images
Diagrams are common tools for representing complex concepts, relationships
and events, often when it would be difficult to portray the same information
with natural images. Understanding natural images has been extensively studied
in computer vision, while diagram understanding has received little attention.
In this paper, we study the problem of diagram interpretation and reasoning,
the challenging task of identifying the structure of a diagram and the
semantics of its constituents and their relationships. We introduce Diagram
Parse Graphs (DPG) as our representation to model the structure of diagrams. We
define syntactic parsing of diagrams as learning to infer DPGs for diagrams and
study semantic interpretation and reasoning of diagrams in the context of
diagram question answering. We devise an LSTM-based method for syntactic
parsing of diagrams and introduce a DPG-based attention model for diagram
question answering. We compile a new dataset of diagrams with exhaustive
annotations of constituents and relationships for over 5,000 diagrams and
15,000 questions and answers. Our results show the significance of our models
for syntactic parsing and question answering in diagrams using DPGs
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