PVM is out

So finally after many months we can share our progress. Predictive Vision Model (PVM) is a new recurrent learning architecture we've been exploring for a while now. The paper showing initial results is available here https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06854 and the corresponding code is https://github.com/braincorp/PVM .

So what is PVM? It is a new approach to learning foundations of perception in an unsupervised way. We exploit the idea of multi-scale and multi-level stacked predictive encoders (similar to autoencoder but tries to predict the next frame in a sequence of inputs). We then find, that if we train this architecture online, we can liberally wire it with feedback and lateral connectivity and nothing breaks! So we end up with a scalable, unsupervised architecture that naturally operates in time and is able to exploit all the regularities, which are so obvious to us - humans  highly visual animals - that we don't even notice them consciously until we are faced with an optical illusion.

This is really just the beginning of the work. We experimented a lot, therefore we decided not to invest into a GPU implementations, but now this certainly is a good avenue to pursue. Recurrent feedback and online operation make it difficult … Read more...