327,188 research outputs found
The evolutionary origins of hierarchy
Hierarchical organization -- the recursive composition of sub-modules -- is
ubiquitous in biological networks, including neural, metabolic, ecological, and
genetic regulatory networks, and in human-made systems, such as large
organizations and the Internet. To date, most research on hierarchy in networks
has been limited to quantifying this property. However, an open, important
question in evolutionary biology is why hierarchical organization evolves in
the first place. It has recently been shown that modularity evolves because of
the presence of a cost for network connections. Here we investigate whether
such connection costs also tend to cause a hierarchical organization of such
modules. In computational simulations, we find that networks without a
connection cost do not evolve to be hierarchical, even when the task has a
hierarchical structure. However, with a connection cost, networks evolve to be
both modular and hierarchical, and these networks exhibit higher overall
performance and evolvability (i.e. faster adaptation to new environments).
Additional analyses confirm that hierarchy independently improves adaptability
after controlling for modularity. Overall, our results suggest that the same
force--the cost of connections--promotes the evolution of both hierarchy and
modularity, and that these properties are important drivers of network
performance and adaptability. In addition to shedding light on the emergence of
hierarchy across the many domains in which it appears, these findings will also
accelerate future research into evolving more complex, intelligent
computational brains in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics.Comment: 32 page
Hi-Val: Iterative Learning of Hierarchical Value Functions for Policy Generation
Task decomposition is effective in manifold applications where the global complexity of a problem makes planning and decision-making too demanding. This is true, for example, in high-dimensional robotics domains, where (1) unpredictabilities and modeling limitations typically prevent the manual specification of robust behaviors, and (2) learning an action policy is challenging due to the curse of dimensionality. In this work, we borrow the concept of Hierarchical Task Networks (HTNs) to decompose the learning procedure, and we exploit Upper Confidence Tree (UCT) search to introduce HOP, a novel iterative algorithm for hierarchical optimistic planning with learned value functions. To obtain better generalization and generate policies, HOP simultaneously learns and uses action values. These are used to formalize constraints within the search space and to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. We evaluate our algorithm both on a fetching task using a simulated 7-DOF KUKA light weight arm and, on a pick and delivery task with a Pioneer robot
Hierarchical Multi-resolution Mesh Networks for Brain Decoding
We propose a new framework, called Hierarchical Multi-resolution Mesh
Networks (HMMNs), which establishes a set of brain networks at multiple time
resolutions of fMRI signal to represent the underlying cognitive process. The
suggested framework, first, decomposes the fMRI signal into various frequency
subbands using wavelet transforms. Then, a brain network, called mesh network,
is formed at each subband by ensembling a set of local meshes. The locality
around each anatomic region is defined with respect to a neighborhood system
based on functional connectivity. The arc weights of a mesh are estimated by
ridge regression formed among the average region time series. In the final
step, the adjacency matrices of mesh networks obtained at different subbands
are ensembled for brain decoding under a hierarchical learning architecture,
called, fuzzy stacked generalization (FSG). Our results on Human Connectome
Project task-fMRI dataset reflect that the suggested HMMN model can
successfully discriminate tasks by extracting complementary information
obtained from mesh arc weights of multiple subbands. We study the topological
properties of the mesh networks at different resolutions using the network
measures, namely, node degree, node strength, betweenness centrality and global
efficiency; and investigate the connectivity of anatomic regions, during a
cognitive task. We observe significant variations among the network topologies
obtained for different subbands. We, also, analyze the diversity properties of
classifier ensemble, trained by the mesh networks in multiple subbands and
observe that the classifiers in the ensemble collaborate with each other to
fuse the complementary information freed at each subband. We conclude that the
fMRI data, recorded during a cognitive task, embed diverse information across
the anatomic regions at each resolution.Comment: 18 page
Quantifying the vanishing gradient and long distance dependency problem in recursive neural networks and recursive LSTMs
Recursive neural networks (RNN) and their recently proposed extension
recursive long short term memory networks (RLSTM) are models that compute
representations for sentences, by recursively combining word embeddings
according to an externally provided parse tree. Both models thus, unlike
recurrent networks, explicitly make use of the hierarchical structure of a
sentence. In this paper, we demonstrate that RNNs nevertheless suffer from the
vanishing gradient and long distance dependency problem, and that RLSTMs
greatly improve over RNN's on these problems. We present an artificial learning
task that allows us to quantify the severity of these problems for both models.
We further show that a ratio of gradients (at the root node and a focal leaf
node) is highly indicative of the success of backpropagation at optimizing the
relevant weights low in the tree. This paper thus provides an explanation for
existing, superior results of RLSTMs on tasks such as sentiment analysis, and
suggests that the benefits of including hierarchical structure and of including
LSTM-style gating are complementary
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