A biologically inspired approach for interactive learning of categories

An amazing capability of the human visual system is the ability to learn a large repertoire of visual categories. We propose an architecture for learning visual categories in an interactive and life-long fashion based on complex-shaped objects, which typically belong to several different categories. The fundamental problem of life-long learning with artificial neural networks is the so-called “stability-plasticity dilemma”. This dilemma refers to the incremental incorporation of newly acquired knowledge, while also the earlier learned information should be preserved. To achieve this learning ability we propose biologically inspired modifications to the established learning vector quantization (LVQ) approach and combine it with a category-specific forward feature selection to decouple co-occurring categories. Both parts are optimized together to ensure a compact and efficient category representation, which is necessary for fast and interactive learning.