Proceedings of the KI 2015 Workshop on Formal and Cognitive Reasoning


    Shaping the Dynamics of Recurrent Neural
             Networks by Conceptors


                                Herbert Jaeger
                           Jacobs University Bremen
                                 Campus Ring
                                28759 Bremen
                                   Germany



Summary

    The human brain is a dynamical system whose extremely complex sensor-
driven neural processes give rise to conceptual, logical cognition. Understanding
the interplay between nonlinear neural dynamics and concept-level cognition
remains a major scientific challenge. Here I propose a mechanism of neurody-
namical organization, called conceptors, which unites nonlinear dynamics with
basic principles of conceptual abstraction and logic. It becomes possible to learn,
store, abstract, focus, morph, generalize, de-noise and recognize a large number
of dynamical patterns within a single neural system; novel patterns can be added
without interfering with previously acquired ones; neural noise is automatically
filtered. Conceptors may help to explain how conceptual-level information pro-
cessing emerges naturally and robustly in neural systems, and may help to re-
move a number of roadblocks in the theory and applications of recurrent neural
networks.




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