Cooperative Game Theory within Multi-Agent Systems for Systems Scheduling

Research concerning organization and coordination within multi-agent systems continues to draw from a variety of architectures and methodologies. The work presented in this paper combines techniques from game theory and multi-agent systems to produce self-organizing, polymorphic, lightweight, embedded agents for systems scheduling within a large-scale real-time systems environment. Results show how this approach is used to experimentally produce optimum real-time scheduling through the emergent behavior of thousands of agents. These results are obtained using a SWARM simulation of systems scheduling within a High Energy Physics experiment consisting of 2500 digital signal processors.Comment: Fourth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS), Kitakyushu, Japan, December, 200

A Self-Organizing Neural System for Learning to Recognize Textured Scenes

A self-organizing ARTEX model is developed to categorize and classify textured image regions. ARTEX specializes the FACADE model of how the visual cortex sees, and the ART model of how temporal and prefrontal cortices interact with the hippocampal system to learn visual recognition categories and their names. FACADE processing generates a vector of boundary and surface properties, notably texture and brightness properties, by utilizing multi-scale filtering, competition, and diffusive filling-in. Its context-sensitive local measures of textured scenes can be used to recognize scenic properties that gradually change across space, as well a.s abrupt texture boundaries. ART incrementally learns recognition categories that classify FACADE output vectors, class names of these categories, and their probabilities. Top-down expectations within ART encode learned prototypes that pay attention to expected visual features. When novel visual information creates a poor match with the best existing category prototype, a memory search selects a new category with which classify the novel data. ARTEX is compared with psychophysical data, and is benchmarked on classification of natural textures and synthetic aperture radar images. It outperforms state-of-the-art systems that use rule-based, backpropagation, and K-nearest neighbor classifiers.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0657

The What-And-Where Filter: A Spatial Mapping Neural Network for Object Recognition and Image Understanding

The What-and-Where filter forms part of a neural network architecture for spatial mapping, object recognition, and image understanding. The Where fllter responds to an image figure that has been separated from its background. It generates a spatial map whose cell activations simultaneously represent the position, orientation, ancl size of all tbe figures in a scene (where they are). This spatial map may he used to direct spatially localized attention to these image features. A multiscale array of oriented detectors, followed by competitve and interpolative interactions between position, orientation, and size scales, is used to define the Where filter. This analysis discloses several issues that need to be dealt with by a spatial mapping system that is based upon oriented filters, such as the role of cliff filters with and without normalization, the double peak problem of maximum orientation across size scale, and the different self-similar interpolation properties across orientation than across size scale. Several computationally efficient Where filters are proposed. The Where filter rnay be used for parallel transformation of multiple image figures into invariant representations that are insensitive to the figures' original position, orientation, and size. These invariant figural representations form part of a system devoted to attentive object learning and recognition (what it is). Unlike some alternative models where serial search for a target occurs, a What and Where representation can he used to rapidly search in parallel for a desired target in a scene. Such a representation can also be used to learn multidimensional representations of objects and their spatial relationships for purposes of image understanding. The What-and-Where filter is inspired by neurobiological data showing that a Where processing stream in the cerebral cortex is used for attentive spatial localization and orientation, whereas a What processing stream is used for attentive object learning and recognition.Advanced Research Projects Agency (ONR-N00014-92-J-4015, AFOSR 90-0083); British Petroleum (89-A-1204); National Science Foundation (IRI-90-00530, Graduate Fellowship); Office of Naval Research (N00014-91-J-4100, N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0657); Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-92-J-0499, F49620-92-J-0334

Improving Sparsity in Kernel Adaptive Filters Using a Unit-Norm Dictionary

Kernel adaptive filters, a class of adaptive nonlinear time-series models, are known by their ability to learn expressive autoregressive patterns from sequential data. However, for trivial monotonic signals, they struggle to perform accurate predictions and at the same time keep computational complexity within desired boundaries. This is because new observations are incorporated to the dictionary when they are far from what the algorithm has seen in the past. We propose a novel approach to kernel adaptive filtering that compares new observations against dictionary samples in terms of their unit-norm (normalised) versions, meaning that new observations that look like previous samples but have a different magnitude are not added to the dictionary. We achieve this by proposing the unit-norm Gaussian kernel and define a sparsification criterion for this novel kernel. This new methodology is validated on two real-world datasets against standard KAF in terms of the normalised mean square error and the dictionary size.Comment: Accepted at the IEEE Digital Signal Processing conference 201

Advances in Self Organising Maps

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) with its related extensions is the most popular artificial neural algorithm for use in unsupervised learning, clustering, classification and data visualization. Over 5,000 publications have been reported in the open literature, and many commercial projects employ the SOM as a tool for solving hard real-world problems. Each two years, the "Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps" (WSOM) covers the new developments in the field. The WSOM series of conferences was initiated in 1997 by Prof. Teuvo Kohonen, and has been successfully organized in 1997 and 1999 by the Helsinki University of Technology, in 2001 by the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, and in 2003 by the Kyushu Institute of Technology. The Universit\'{e} Paris I Panth\'{e}on Sorbonne (SAMOS-MATISSE research centre) organized WSOM 2005 in Paris on September 5-8, 2005.Comment: Special Issue of the Neural Networks Journal after WSOM 05 in Pari

A Self-Organizing System for Classifying Complex Images: Natural Textures and Synthetic Aperture Radar

A self-organizing architecture is developed for image region classification. The system consists of a preprocessor that utilizes multi-scale filtering, competition, cooperation, and diffusion to compute a vector of image boundary and surface properties, notably texture and brightness properties. This vector inputs to a system that incrementally learns noisy multidimensional mappings and their probabilities. The architecture is applied to difficult real-world image classification problems, including classification of synthetic aperture radar and natural texture images, and outperforms a recent state-of-the-art system at classifying natural texturns.Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0657, N00014-91-J-4100); Advanced Research Projects Agency (N00014-92-J-4015); Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-92-J-0225, F49620-92-J-0334); National Science Foundation (IRI-90-00530, IRI-90-24877

ARTEX: A Self-Organizing Architecture for Classifying Image Regions

A self-organizing architect is developed for image region classification. The system consists of a preprocessor that utilizes multi-scale filtering, competition, cooperation, and diffusion to compute a vector of image boundary and surface properties, notably texture and brightness properties. This vector inputs to a system that incrementally learns noisy multidimensional mappings and their probabilities. The architecture is applied to diflicult real-world image classification problems, including classification of synthetic aperture radar and natural textural images, and outperforms a recent state-of-the-art system at classifying natural textures.Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0657, N00014-91-J-4100, N00014-95-1-0409); Advanced Research Projects Agency (N00014-92-J-4015); Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-92-J-4015, F49620-92-J-0334); National Science Foundation (IRI-90-00530, IRI-90-24877). an

A Self-Organizing System for Classifying Complex Images: Natural Textures and Synthetic Aperture Radar

A self-organizing architecture is developed for image region classification. The system consists of a preprocessor that utilizes multi-scale filtering, competition, cooperation, and diffusion to compute a vector of image boundary and surface properties, notably texture and brightness properties. This vector inputs to a system that incrementally learns noisy multidimensional mappings and their probabilities. The architecture is applied to difficult real-world image classification problems, including classification of synthetic aperture radar and natural texture images, and outperforms a recent state-of-the-art system at classifying natural texturns.Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0657, N00014-91-J-4100); Advanced Research Projects Agency (N00014-92-J-4015); Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-92-J-0225, F49620-92-J-0334); National Science Foundation (IRI-90-00530, IRI-90-24877