Efficient Learning in Cellular Simultaneous Recurrent Neural Networks - The Case of Maze Navigation Problem

Cellular simultaneous recurrent neural networks (SRN) show great promise in solving complex function approximation problems. In particular, approximate dynamic programming is an important application area where SRNs have significant potential advantages compared to other approximation methods. Learning in SRNs, however, proved to be a notoriously difficult problem, which prevented their broader use. This paper introduces an extended Kalman filter approach to train SRNs. Using the two-dimensional maze navigation problem as a testbed, we illustrate the operation of the method and demonstrate its benefits in generalization and testing performance