In turn, KWTA networks can be used as decoders of a class of nonlinear error-correcting codes. By interconnecting such KWTA networks, we can construct decoders capable of decoding more powerful codes. We consider several families of interconnected KWTA networks, analyze their performance in terms of coding theory metrics, and consider the feasibility of embedding such networks in VLSI technologies.

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Dean A. Pomerleau School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Abstract The ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network) project addresses the problem of training artificial neural networks in real time to perform difficult perception tasks. ALVINN,is a back-propagation network that uses inputs from a video camera and an imaging laser rangefinder to drive the CMU Navlab, a modified Chevy van. This paper describes training techniques which allow ALVINN to learn in under 5 minutes to autonomously control the Navlab by watching a human driver's response to new situations. Using these techniques, ALVINN has been trained to drive in a variety of circumstances including single-lane paved and unpaved roads, multilane lined and unlined roads, and obstacle-ridden on-and off-road environments, at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. 1 INTRODUCTION Previous trainable connectionist perception systems have often ignored important aspects of the form and content of available sensor data. Because of the assumed impracticality of training networks to perform realistic high level perception tasks, connectionist researchers have frequently restricted their task domains to either toy problems (e.g. the TC identification problem [11] [6]) or fixed low level operations (e.g.

Feature selective cells in the primary visual cortex of several species are organized in hierarchical topographic maps of stimulus features like "position in visual space", "orientation" and" ocular dominance". In order to understand and describe their spatial structure and their development, we investigate a self-organizing neural network model based on the feature map algorithm. The model explains map formation as a dimension-reducing mapping from a high-dimensional feature space onto a two-dimensional lattice, such that "similarity" between features (or feature combinations) is translated into "spatial proximity" between the corresponding feature selective cells. The model is able to reproduce several aspects of the spatial structure of cortical maps in the visual cortex. 1 Introduction Cortical maps are functionally defined structures of the cortex, which are characterized by an ordered spatial distribution of functionally specialized cells along the cortical surface. In the primary visual area(s) the response properties of these cells must be described by several independent features, and there is a strong tendency to map combinations of these features onto the cortical surface in a way that translates "similarity" into "spatial proximity" of the corresponding feature selective cells (see e.g.

In the debate over the power of connectionist models to handle linguistic phenomena, considerable attention has been focused on the learning of simple morphological rules. It is a straightforward matter in a symbolic system to specify how the meanings of a stem and a bound morpheme combine to yield the meaning of a whole word and how the form of the bound morpheme depends on the shape of the stem. In a distributed connectionist system, however, where there may be no explicit morphemes, words, or rules, things are not so simple. The most important work in this area has been that of Rumelhart and McClelland (1986), together with later extensions by Marchman and Plunkett (1989). The networks involved were trained to associate English verb stems with the corresponding past-tense forms, successfully generating both regular and irregular forms and generalizing to novel inputs.

For a detailed rationale the reader is referred to the work of Rissanen (1984) or Wallace and Freeman (1987) and the references therein. Note that the Minimum Description Length (MDL) technique (as Rissanen's approach has become known) is implicitly related to Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) Bayesian estimation techniques if cast in the appropriate framework.

Since Kendrew & Perutz solved the first protein structures, myoglobin and hemoglobin, and explained from the discovered structures how these proteins perform their function, it has been widely recognized that protein function is intimately linked with protein structure[l]. Within the last two decades X-ray crystallographers have solved the 3-dimensional (3D) structures of a steadily increasing number of proteins in the crystalline state, and recently 2D-NMR spectroscopy has emerged as an alternative method for small proteins in solution. Today approximately three hundred 3D structures have been solved by these methods, although only about half of them can be considered as truly different, and only around a hundred of them are solved at high resolution (that is, less than 2A). The number of protein sequences known today is well over 20,000, and this number seems to be growing at least one order of magnitude faster than the number of known 3D protein structures. Obviously, it is of great importance to develop tools that can predict structural aspects of proteins on the basis of knowledge acquired from known 3D structures.

Recent progress in network design demonstrates that nonlinear feedforward neural networks can perform impressive pattern classification for a variety of real-world applications (e.g., Le Cun et al., 1990; Waibel et al., 1989). Various simulations and relationships between the neural network and machine learning theoretical literatures also suggest that too large a number of free parameters ("weight overfitting") could substantially reduce generalization performance.

ABSTRACT A large number of VLSI implementations of neural network models have been reported. The diversity of these implementations is noteworthy. This paper attempts to put a group of representative VLSI implementations in perspective by comparing and contrasting them. Design tradeoffs are discussed and some suggestions forthe direction of future implementation efforts are made. IMPLEMENTATION Changing the way information is represented can be beneficial.

We present a unified framework for a number of different ways of failing to generalize properly.