Learning Temporally Persistent Hierarchical Representations

A biologically motivated model of cortical self-organization is pro(cid:173) posed. Context is combined with bottom-up information via a maximum likelihood cost function. Clusters of one or more units are modulated by a common contextual gating Signal; they thereby organize themselves into mutually supportive predictors of abstract contextual features. The model was tested in its ability to discover viewpoint-invariant classes on a set of real image sequences of cen(cid:173) tered, gradually rotating faces. It performed considerably better than supervised back-propagation at generalizing to novel views from a small number of training examples. The importance of context effects l in perception has been demonstrated in many domains.