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Jürgen Schmidhuber's page on
Computer Vision with Fast Deep Neural Nets Etc Yield Best Results on Many Visual Pattern Recognition Benchmarks
mouse in maze

LEARNING ATTENTIVE VISION
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Humans and other biological systems use sequential gaze shifts to detect and recognize patterns. This can be much more efficient than fully parallel approaches to pattern recognition.

In 1990 Schmidhuber and his diploma student Huber built an artificial fovea controlled by an adaptive neural controller. The fovea had high resolution in the center and low resolution in the periphery. Without a teacher, it learned trajectories causing the fovea to find targets in simple visual scenes, and to track moving targets.

The controller used an adaptive input predictor (a limited kind of world model) to optimize its action sequences.

The only goal information was the shape of the target - the desired final input. Since this reinforcement learning task is of the `reward-only- at-goal' type, it involves a complex spatio- temporal credit assignment problem. The latter was solved using a recurrent network training algorithm. Here are jpeg scans of the figures from ref 3 (1991):
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Related links:

Full publication list
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Reinforcement learning

Active Exploration

Recurrent networks

Learning robots

Hierarchical learning & subgoal generation.

3. J. Schmidhuber and R. Huber. Learning to generate artificial fovea trajectories for target detection. International Journal of Neural Systems, 2(1 & 2):135-141, 1991 (50 K - figures omitted, but see jpeg scans above!). PDF . HTML.

2. J.  Schmidhuber and R. Huber. Using sequential adaptive neuro-control for efficient learning of rotation and translation invariance. In T. Kohonen, K. Mäkisara, O. Simula, and J. Kangas, editors, Artificial Neural Networks, pages 315-320. Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., North-Holland, 1991.

1. J.  Schmidhuber and R. Huber. Learning to generate focus trajectories for attentive vision. Technical Report FKI-128-90, Institut für Informatik, Technische Universität München, 1990.

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