Recent advances in associative memory design through structured pattern sets and graph-based inference algorithms have allowed reliable learning and recall of an exponential number of patterns. Although these designs correct external errors in recall, they assume neurons that compute noiselessly, in contrast to the highly variable neurons in brain regions thought to operate associatively such as hippocampus and olfactory cortex. Here we consider associative memories with noisy internal computations and analytically characterize performance. As long as the internal noise level is below a specified threshold, the error probability in the recall phase can be made exceedingly small. More surprisingly, we show that internal noise actually improves the performance of the recall phase while the pattern retrieval capacity remains intact, i.e., the number of stored patterns does not reduce with noise (up to a threshold). Computational experiments lend additional support to our theoretical analysis. This work suggests a functional benefit to noisy neurons in biological neuronal networks.
The basic memory architecture, learning rule, and recall algorithm used herein is from @cite_37 , which also achieves exponential capacity by capturing internal redundancy by dividing the patterns into smaller clusters, with each subpattern satisfying a set of linear constraints. The problem of learning linear constraints with neural networks was considered in @cite_30 , but without sparsity requirements. This has connections to compressed sensing @cite_54 ; typical compressed sensing recall decoding algorithms are too complicated to be implemented by neural networks, but some have suggested the biological plausibility of message-passing algorithms @cite_52 .
@cite_30 @cite_37 @cite_54 @cite_52
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The task of a neural associative memory is to retrieve a set of previously memorized patterns from their noisy versions by using a network of neurons. Hence, an ideal network should be able to 1) gradually learn a set of patterns, 2) retrieve the correct pattern from noisy queries and 3) maximize the number of memorized patterns while maintaining the reliability in responding to queries. We show that by considering the inherent redundancy in the memorized patterns, one can obtain all the mentioned properties at once. This is in sharp contrast with previous work that could only improve one or two aspects at the expense of the others. More specifically, we devise an iterative algorithm that learns the redundancy among the patterns. The resulting network has a retrieval capacity that is exponential in the size of the network. Lastly, by considering the local structures of the network, the asymptotic error correction performance can be made linear in the size of the network. Automatically describing the contents of an image is one of the fundamental problems in artificial intelligence. Recent research has primarily focussed on improving the quality of the generated descriptions. It is possible to construct multiple architectures that achieve equivalent performance for the same task. Among these, the smaller architecture is desirable as they require less communication across servers during distributed training and less bandwidth to export a new model from one place to another through a network. Generally, a deep learning architecture for image captioning consists of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) clubbed together within an encoder-decoder framework. We propose to combine a significantly smaller CNN architecture termed SqueezeNet and a memory and computation efficient LightRNN within a visual attention framework. Experimental evaluation of the proposed architecture on Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS-COCO datasets reveal superior result when compared to the state of the art. We consider the problem of neural association for a network of non-binary neurons. Here, the task is to recall a previously memorized pattern from its noisy version using a network of neurons whose states assume values from a finite number of non-negative integer levels. Prior works in this area consider storing a finite number of purely random patterns, and have shown that the pattern retrieval capacities (maximum number of patterns that can be memorized) scale only linearly with the number of neurons in the network. In our formulation of the problem, we consider storing patterns from a suitably chosen set of patterns, that are obtained by enforcing a set of simple constraints on the coordinates (such as those enforced in graph based codes). Such patterns may be generated from purely random information symbols by simple neural operations. Two simple neural update algorithms are presented, and it is shown that our proposed mechanisms result in a pattern retrieval capacity that is exponential in terms of the network size. Furthermore, using analytical results and simulations, we show that the suggested methods can tolerate a fair amount of errors in the input. We present a novel and practical deep fully convolutional neural network architecture for semantic pixel-wise segmentation termed SegNet. This core trainable segmentation engine consists of an encoder network, a corresponding decoder network followed by a pixel-wise classification layer. The architecture of the encoder network is topologically identical to the 13 convolutional layers in the VGG16 network [1] . The role of the decoder network is to map the low resolution encoder feature maps to full input resolution feature maps for pixel-wise classification. The novelty of SegNet lies is in the manner in which the decoder upsamples its lower resolution input feature map(s). Specifically, the decoder uses pooling indices computed in the max-pooling step of the corresponding encoder to perform non-linear upsampling. This eliminates the need for learning to upsample. The upsampled maps are sparse and are then convolved with trainable filters to produce dense feature maps. We compare our proposed architecture with the widely adopted FCN [2] and also with the well known DeepLab-LargeFOV [3] , DeconvNet [4] architectures. This comparison reveals the memory versus accuracy trade-off involved in achieving good segmentation performance. SegNet was primarily motivated by scene understanding applications. Hence, it is designed to be efficient both in terms of memory and computational time during inference. It is also significantly smaller in the number of trainable parameters than other competing architectures and can be trained end-to-end using stochastic gradient descent. We also performed a controlled benchmark of SegNet and other architectures on both road scenes and SUN RGB-D indoor scene segmentation tasks. These quantitative assessments show that SegNet provides good performance with competitive inference time and most efficient inference memory-wise as compared to other architectures. We also provide a Caffe implementation of SegNet and a web demo at http: mi.eng.cam.ac.uk projects segnet .