A Self-Organized Neural Comparator

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unsupervised, self-organizing neural comparator that learns to compare different neural input streams by adapting through local anti-Hebbian rules, without external supervision.

Contribution

It presents a novel neural circuitry that self-organizes to compare inputs, capable of handling different encodings and sizes without prior knowledge or supervision.

Findings

The neural comparator can compare previously unseen objects.

It adapts to different input sizes and encodings.

It operates through local anti-Hebbian learning rules.

Abstract

Learning algorithms need generally the possibility to compare several streams of information. Neural learning architectures hence need a unit, a comparator, able to compare several inputs encoding either internal or external information, like for instance predictions and sensory readings. Without the possibility of comparing the values of prediction to actual sensory inputs, reward evaluation and supervised learning would not be possible. Comparators are usually not implemented explicitly, necessary comparisons are commonly performed by directly comparing one-to-one the respective activities. This implies that the characteristics of the two input streams (like size and encoding) must be provided at the time of designing the system. It is however plausible that biological comparators emerge from self-organizing, genetically encoded principles, which allow the system to adapt to the changes in the input and in the organism. We propose an unsupervised neural circuitry, where the function of input comparison emerges via self-organization only from the interaction of the system with the respective inputs, without external influence or supervision. The proposed neural comparator adapts, unsupervised, according to the correlations present in the input streams. The system consists of a multilayer feed-forward neural network which follows a local output minimization (anti-Hebbian) rule for adaptation of the synaptic weights. The local output minimization allows the circuit to autonomously acquire the capability of comparing the neural activities received from different neural populations, which may differ in the size of the population and in the neural encoding used. The comparator is able to compare objects never encountered before in the sensory input streams and to evaluate a measure of their similarity, even when differently encoded.