Competitive Anti-Hebbian Learning of Invariants

Although the detection of invariant structure in a given set of input patterns is vital to many recognition tasks, connectionist learning rules tend to focus on directions of high variance (principal components). The prediction paradigm is often used to reconcile this dichotomy; here we suggest a more direct approach to invariant learning based on an anti-Hebbian learning rule. An unsupervised two-layer network implementing this method in a competitive setting learns to extract coherent depth information from random-dot stereograms.