English

CSNNs: Unsupervised, Backpropagation-free Convolutional Neural Networks for Representation Learning

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2020-01-30 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

This work combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), clustering via Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) and Hebbian Learning to propose the building blocks of Convolutional Self-Organizing Neural Networks (CSNNs), which learn representations in an unsupervised and Backpropagation-free manner. Our approach replaces the learning of traditional convolutional layers from CNNs with the competitive learning procedure of SOMs and simultaneously learns local masks between those layers with separate Hebbian-like learning rules to overcome the problem of disentangling factors of variation when filters are learned through clustering. We investigate the learned representation by designing two simple models with our building blocks, achieving comparable performance to many methods which use Backpropagation, while we reach comparable performance on Cifar10 and give baseline performances on Cifar100, Tiny ImageNet and a small subset of ImageNet for Backpropagation-free methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.10388,
  title  = {CSNNs: Unsupervised, Backpropagation-free Convolutional Neural Networks for Representation Learning},
  author = {Bonifaz Stuhr and Jürgen Brauer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.10388},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

18 pages,18 figures, Author's extended version of the paper. Final version presented at 18th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA). Boca Raton, Florida / USA. 2019

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:23:01.490Z