3,435 research outputs found
The evolution of representation in simple cognitive networks
Representations are internal models of the environment that can provide
guidance to a behaving agent, even in the absence of sensory information. It is
not clear how representations are developed and whether or not they are
necessary or even essential for intelligent behavior. We argue here that the
ability to represent relevant features of the environment is the expected
consequence of an adaptive process, give a formal definition of representation
based on information theory, and quantify it with a measure R. To measure how R
changes over time, we evolve two types of networks---an artificial neural
network and a network of hidden Markov gates---to solve a categorization task
using a genetic algorithm. We find that the capacity to represent increases
during evolutionary adaptation, and that agents form representations of their
environment during their lifetime. This ability allows the agents to act on
sensorial inputs in the context of their acquired representations and enables
complex and context-dependent behavior. We examine which concepts (features of
the environment) our networks are representing, how the representations are
logically encoded in the networks, and how they form as an agent behaves to
solve a task. We conclude that R should be able to quantify the representations
within any cognitive system, and should be predictive of an agent's long-term
adaptive success.Comment: 36 pages, 10 figures, one Tabl
Maximum Resilience of Artificial Neural Networks
The deployment of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in safety-critical
applications poses a number of new verification and certification challenges.
In particular, for ANN-enabled self-driving vehicles it is important to
establish properties about the resilience of ANNs to noisy or even maliciously
manipulated sensory input. We are addressing these challenges by defining
resilience properties of ANN-based classifiers as the maximal amount of input
or sensor perturbation which is still tolerated. This problem of computing
maximal perturbation bounds for ANNs is then reduced to solving mixed integer
optimization problems (MIP). A number of MIP encoding heuristics are developed
for drastically reducing MIP-solver runtimes, and using parallelization of
MIP-solvers results in an almost linear speed-up in the number (up to a certain
limit) of computing cores in our experiments. We demonstrate the effectiveness
and scalability of our approach by means of computing maximal resilience bounds
for a number of ANN benchmark sets ranging from typical image recognition
scenarios to the autonomous maneuvering of robots.Comment: Timestamp research work conducted in the project. version 2: fix some
typos, rephrase the definition, and add some more existing wor
Multi-criteria Evolution of Neural Network Topologies: Balancing Experience and Performance in Autonomous Systems
Majority of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) implementations in autonomous
systems use a fixed/user-prescribed network topology, leading to sub-optimal
performance and low portability. The existing neuro-evolution of augmenting
topology or NEAT paradigm offers a powerful alternative by allowing the network
topology and the connection weights to be simultaneously optimized through an
evolutionary process. However, most NEAT implementations allow the
consideration of only a single objective. There also persists the question of
how to tractably introduce topological diversification that mitigates
overfitting to training scenarios. To address these gaps, this paper develops a
multi-objective neuro-evolution algorithm. While adopting the basic elements of
NEAT, important modifications are made to the selection, speciation, and
mutation processes. With the backdrop of small-robot path-planning
applications, an experience-gain criterion is derived to encapsulate the amount
of diverse local environment encountered by the system. This criterion
facilitates the evolution of genes that support exploration, thereby seeking to
generalize from a smaller set of mission scenarios than possible with
performance maximization alone. The effectiveness of the single-objective
(optimizing performance) and the multi-objective (optimizing performance and
experience-gain) neuro-evolution approaches are evaluated on two different
small-robot cases, with ANNs obtained by the multi-objective optimization
observed to provide superior performance in unseen scenarios
Incorporating sufficient physical information into artificial neural networks: a guaranteed improvement via physics-based Rao-Blackwellization
The concept of Rao-Blackwellization is employed to improve predictions of
artificial neural networks by physical information. The error norm and the
proof of improvement are transferred from the original statistical concept to a
deterministic one, using sufficient information on physics-based conditions.
The proposed strategy is applied to material modeling and illustrated by
examples of the identification of a yield function, elasto-plastic steel
simulations, the identification of driving forces for quasi-brittle damage and
rubber experiments. Sufficient physical information is employed, e.g., in the
form of invariants, parameters of a minimization problem, dimensional analysis,
isotropy and differentiability. It is proven how intuitive accretion of
information can yield improvement if it is physically sufficient, but also how
insufficient or superfluous information can cause impairment. Opportunities for
the improvement of artificial neural networks are explored in terms of the
training data set, the networks' structure and output filters. Even crude
initial predictions are remarkably improved by reducing noise, overfitting and
data requirements
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