Boston University Center for Adaptive Systems and Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Abstract
This paper proposes a biologically-motivated neural network model of supervised learning. The model possesses two novel learning mechanisms. The first is a network for learning topographic mixtures. The network's internal category nodes are the mixture components, which learn to encode smooth distributions in the input space by taking advantage of topography in the input feature maps. The second mechanism is an attentional biasing feedback circuit. When the network makes an incorrect output prediction, this feedback circuit modulates the learning rates of the category nodes, by amounts based on the sharpness of their tuning, in order to improve the network's prediction accuracy. The network is evaluated on several standard classification benchmarks and shown to perform well in comparison to other classifiers. Possible relationships are discussed between the network's learning properties and those of biological neural networks. Possible future extensions of the network are also discussed.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409
