View-tolerant face recognition and Hebbian learning imply mirror-symmetric neural tuning to head orientation

The primate brain contains a hierarchy of visual areas, dubbed the ventral stream, which rapidly computes object representations that are both specific for object identity and relatively robust against identity-preserving transformations like depth-rotations. Current computational models of object recognition, including recent deep learning networks, generate these properties through a hierarchy of alternating selectivity-increasing filtering and tolerance-increasing pooling operations, similar to simple-complex cells operations. While simulations of these models recapitulate the ventral stream's progression from early view-specific to late view-tolerant representations, they fail to generate the most salient property of the intermediate representation for faces found in the brain: mirror-symmetric tuning of the neural population to head orientation. Here we prove that a class of hierarchical architectures and a broad set of biologically plausible learning rules can provide approximate invariance at the top level of the network. While most of the learning rules do not yield mirror-symmetry in the mid-level representations, we characterize a specific biologically-plausible Hebb-type learning rule that is guaranteed to generate mirror-symmetric tuning to faces tuning at intermediate levels of the architecture

Learning the Irreducible Representations of Commutative Lie Groups

We present a new probabilistic model of compact commutative Lie groups that produces invariant-equivariant and disentangled representations of data. To define the notion of disentangling, we borrow a fundamental principle from physics that is used to derive the elementary particles of a system from its symmetries. Our model employs a newfound Bayesian conjugacy relation that enables fully tractable probabilistic inference over compact commutative Lie groups -- a class that includes the groups that describe the rotation and cyclic translation of images. We train the model on pairs of transformed image patches, and show that the learned invariant representation is highly effective for classification