A Biologically Supported Error-Correcting Learning Rule

It is shown that a form of synaptic plasticity recently discovered in slices of the rat visual cortex can support an error-correcting learning rule and that this rule performs better than the optimal Hebbian learning rule reported by Willshaw and Dayan (1990).

Abstract

. 1990) can support an error-correcting learning rule. The rule increases weights when both pre- and postsynaptic units are highly active, and decreases them when pre-synaptic activity is high and postsynaptic activation is less than the threshold for weight increment but greater than a lower threshold. We show that this rule corrects false positive outputs in feedforward associative memory, that in an appropriate opponent-unit architecture it corrects misses, and that it performs better than the optimal Hebbian learning rule reported by Willshaw and Dayan (1990).