In single cells of the cat striate cortex, lateral inhibition across orientation and/or spatial frequency is found to enhance preexisting biases. A contrast-dependent but spatially non-selective inhibitory component is also found. Stimulation with ascending and descending contrasts reveals the latter as a response hysteresis that is sensitive, powerful and rapid, suggesting that it is active in day-to-day vision. Both forms of inhibition are not recurrent but are rather network properties. These findings suggest two fundamental inhibitory mechanisms: a global mechanism that limits dynamic range and creates spatial selectivity through thresholding and a local mechanism that specifically refines spatial filter properties.

We propose and empirically evaluate a method for the extraction of expertcomprehensible rules from trained neural networks.

A neural network solution is proposed for solving path planning problems The proposed network is a two-dimensional sheetfaced by mobile robots. of neurons forming a distributed representation of the robot's workspace. Lateral interconnections between neurons are "cooperative", so that the network exhibits oscillatory behaviour. These oscillations are used to generate solutions of Bellman's dynamic programming equation in the context of path planning. Simulation experiments imply that these networks locate paths even in the presence of substantial levels of circuitglobal optimal nOlse. 1 Dynamic Programming and Path Planning Consider a 2-DOF robot moving about in a 2-dimensional world. A robot's location is denoted by the real vector, p.

Visual attention is the ability to dynamically restrict processing to a subset of the visual field. Researchers have long argued that such a mechanism is necessary to efficiently perform many intermediate level visual tasks. This paper describes VISIT, a novel neural network model of visual attention.

We have investigated the properties of neurons in inferior temporal (IT) cortex in monkeys performing a pattern matching task. Simple backpropagation networkswere trained to discriminate the various stimulus conditions on the basis of the measured neuronal signal. We also trained networks to predict the neuronal response waveforms from the spatial patterns ofthe stimuli. The results indicate t.hat IT neurons convey temporally encoded information about both current and remembered patterns, as well as about their behavioral context.

The two well known learning algorithms of recurrent neural networks are the back-propagation (Rumelhart & el al., Werbos) and the forward propagation (Williamsand Zipser). The main drawback of back-propagation is its off-line backward path in time for error cumulation. This violates the online requirement in many practical applications. Although the forward propagation algorithmcan be used in an online manner, the annoying drawback is the heavy computation load required to update the high dimensional sensitivity matrix(0(fir) operations for each time step). Therefore, to develop a fast forward algorithm is a challenging task.

Neurons encoding simple visual features in area VI such as orientation, direction of motion and color are organized in retinotopic maps. However, recentphysiological experiments have shown that the responses of many neurons in VI and other cortical areas are modulated by the direction ofgaze. We have developed a neural network model of the visual cortex to explore the hypothesis that visual features are encoded in headcentered coordinatesat early stages of visual processing. New experiments are suggested for testing this hypothesis using electrical stimulations and psychophysical observations.

By a method of heuristic search over the space of finite state automata with up to eight states, he was able to induce a recognizer for each of these languages (Tomita, 1982). Recognizers of finite-state languages have also been induced using first-order recurrent connectionistnetworks (Elman, 1990; Williams and Zipser, 1988; Cleeremans, Servan-Schreiber and McClelland, 1989). Generally speaking, these results were obtained by training the network to predict the next symbol (Cleeremans, Servan-Schreiber and McClelland, 1989; Williams and Zipser, 1988), rather than by training the network to accept or reject strings of different .lengths. Several training algorithms used an approximation to the gradient (Elman, 1990; Cleeremans, Servan-Schreiberand McClelland, 1989) by truncating the computation of the backward recurrence. The problem of inducing languages from examples has also been approached using second-order recurrent networks (Pollack, 1990; Giles et al., 1990). Using a truncated approximationto the gradient, and Tomita's training sets, Pollack reported that "none of the ideal languages were induced" (Pollack, 1990). On the other hand, a Tomita language has been induced using the complete gradient (Giles et al., 1991). This paper reports the induction of several Tomita languages and the extraction of the corresponding automata with certain differences in method from (Giles et al., 1991).

The subject of this paper is the integration of multi-layered Artificial Neural Networks(ANN) with probability density functions such as Gaussian mixtures found in continuous density Hidden Markov Models (HMM). In the first part of this paper we present an ANN/HMM hybrid in which all the parameters of the the system are simultaneously optimized with respect to a single criterion. In the second part of this paper, we study the relationship between the density of the inputs of the network and the density of the outputs of the networks. A few experiments are presented to explore how to perform density estimation with ANNs. 1 INTRODUCTION This paper studies the integration of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with probability densityfunctions (pdf) such as the Gaussian mixtures often used in continuous density Hidden Markov Models. The ANNs considered here are multi-layered or recurrent networks with hyperbolic tangent hidden units.

This paper examines whether temporal difference methods for training connectionist networks, such as Suttons's TO('\) algorithm, can be successfully appliedto complex real-world problems. A number of important practical issues are identified and discussed from a general theoretical perspective. Thesepractical issues are then examined in the context of a case study in which TO('\) is applied to learning the game of backgammon from the outcome of self-play. This is apparently the first application of this algorithm to a complex nontrivial task. It is found that, with zero knowledge built in, the network is able to learn from scratch to play the entire game at a fairly strong intermediate level of performance, which is clearly better than conventional commercial programs, and which in fact surpasses comparable networks trained on a massive human expert data set. The hidden units in these network have apparently discovered useful features, a longstanding goal of computer games research.