We introduce oriented non-radial basis function networks (ONRBF) as a generalization of Radial Basis Function networks (RBF)- wherein the Euclidean distance metric in the exponent of the Gaussian is replaced bya more general polynomial. This permits the definition of more general regions and in particular-hyper-ellipses with orientations. Inthe case of hyper-surface estimation this scheme requires a smaller number of hidden units and alleviates the "curse of dimensionality" associatedkernel type approximators.In the case of an image, the hidden units correspond to features in the image and the parameters associated with each unit correspond to the rotation, scaling andtranslation properties of that particular "feature". In the context ofthe ONBF scheme, this means that an image can be represented by a small number of features. Since, transformation of an image by rotation, scaling and translation correspond to identical transformations of the individual features, the ONBF scheme can be used to considerable advantage for the purposes of image recognition and analysis.

We demonstrate a multiscale adaptive network model of motion computation in primate area MT. The model consists of two stages: (l) local velocities are measured across multiple spatiotemporal channels, and (2) the optical flow field is computed by a network of directionselective neuronsat multiple spatial resolutions. This model embeds the computational efficiency of Multigrid algorithms within a parallel network as well as adaptively computes the most reliable estimate of the flow field across different spatial scales. Our model neurons show the same nonclassical receptive field properties as Allman's type I MT neurons. Since local velocities are measured across multiple channels, various channels often provide conflicting measurements to the network. We have incorporated a veto scheme for conflict resolution. This mechanism provides a novel explanation for the spatial frequency dependency of the psychophysical phenomenon called Motion Capture. 1 MOTIVATION We previously developed a two-stage model of motion computation in the visual system of primates (Le.

A system for color correction has been designed, built, and tested successfully; theessential components are three custom chips built using subthreshold analogCMOS VLSI. The system, based on Land's Retinex theory of color constancy, produces colors similar in many respects to those produced by the visual system. Resistive grids implemented in analog VLSI perform the smoothing operation central to the algorithm at video rates. With the electronic system, the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithm are explored.

Shavlik Computer Sciences University of Wisconsin Madison, WI 53706 We describe the application of a hybrid symbolic/connectionist machine learning algorithm to the task of recognizing important genetic sequences.

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

Bernard Victorri ELSAP Universite de Caen 14032 Caen Cedex France Fully recurrent (asymmetrical) networks can be thought of as dynamic systems. The dynamics can be shaped to perform content addressable memories, recognize sequences, or generate trajectories. Unfortunately several problems can arise: First, the convergence in the state space is not guaranteed. Second, the learned fixed points or trajectories are not necessarily stable. Finally, there might exist spurious fixed points and/or spurious "attracting" trajectories that do not correspond to any patterns.

One ofthe major theoretical issues in neural computation is to understand how this efficiency is reached given the constraints imposed by the biological hardware. Part of the problem [2] is simply to give an informative representation ofthe visual world using a limited number of neurons, each of which has a limited information capacity. The information capacity of the visual system is determined in part by the spatial transfer characteristics, or "receptive fields," of the individual cells. From a theoretical point of view we can ask if there exists an optimal choice for these receptive fields, a choice which maximizes the information transfer through the system given the hardware constraints. We show that this optimization problem has a simple formulation which allows us to use the intuition developed through the variational approach to quantum mechanics. In general our approach leads to receptive fields which are quite unlike those observed forcells in the visual cortex. In particular orientation selectivity is not a generic prediction. The optimal filters, however, depend on the statistical properties ofthe images we are trying to sample. Natural images have a symmetry - scale invariance [4] - which saves the theory: The optimal receptive fields for sampling of natural images are indeed orientation selective and bear a striking resemblance to observed receptive field characteristics in the mammalian visual cortex as well as the retinal ganglion of lower vertebrates.

A neural network architecture was designed for locating word boundaries and identifying words from phoneme sequences. This architecture was tested in of studies.

We compare the performance of the modular architecture, composed of competing expert networks, suggested by Jacobs, Jordan, Nowlan and Hinton (1991) to the performance of a single back-propagation network on a complex, but low-dimensional, vowel recognition task. Simulations reveal that this system is capable of uncovering interesting decompositions in a complex task. The type of decomposition is strongly influenced by the nature of the input to the gating network that decides which expert to use for each case. The modular architecture also exhibits consistently better generalization on many variations of the task. 1 Introduction If back-propagation is used to train a single, multilayer network to perform different subtasks on different occasions, there will generally be strong interference effects which lead to slow learning and poor generalization. If we know in advance that a set of training cases may be naturally divideJ into subsets that correspond to distinct subtasks, interference can be reduced by using a system (see Figure 1) composed of several different "expert" networks plus a gating network that decides which of the experts should be used for each training case. Systems of this type have been suggested by a number of authors (Hampshire and Waibel, 1989; Jacobs, Jordan and Barto, 1990; Jacobs et al., 1991) (see also the paper by Jacobs and Jordan in this volume (1991».

A novel unsupervised neural network for dimensionality reduction which seeks directions emphasizing multimodality is presented, and its connection toexploratory projection pursuit methods is discussed. This leads to a new statistical insight to the synaptic modification equations governing learning in Bienenstock, Cooper, and Munro (BCM) neurons (1982). The importance of a dimensionality reduction principle based solely on distinguishing features, is demonstrated using a linguistically motivated phoneme recognition experiment, and compared with feature extraction using back-propagation network. 1 Introduction Due to the curse of dimensionality (Bellman, 1961) it is desirable to extract features froma high dimensional data space before attempting a classification. How to perform this feature extraction/dimensionality reduction is not that clear. A first simplification is to consider only features defined by linear (or semi-linear) projections ofhigh dimensional data.