Novel math could bring machine learning to the next level

A team of Italian mathematicians, including a neuroscientist from the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), in Lisbon, Portugal, has shown that artificial vision machines can learn to recognize complex images more quickly by using a mathematical theory that was developed 25 years ago by one of this new study's co-authors. Their results have been published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. In recent decades, machine vision performance has vastly improved. Artificial systems can now learn to recognize virtually any human face or to identify any individual fish moving in a tank. Such machines are, in fact, electronic models of networks of biological neurons, and their aim is to simulate the functioning of the brain, which excels at these visual tasks without any conscious effort on our part.