{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-adaptive-homeostatic-algorithm-for-the","title":"An adaptive homeostatic algorithm for the unsupervised learning of visual features","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2019-05-01","proceeding":"ICLR 2019 5","authors":["Victor Boutin","Angelo Franciosini","Laurent Perrinet"],"abstract":"The formation of structure in the brain, that is, of the connections between cells within neural populations, is by large an unsupervised learning process: the emergence of this architecture is mostly self-organized. In the primary visual cortex of mammals, for example, one may observe during development the formation of cells selective to localized, oriented features. This leads to the development of a rough representation of contours of the retinal image in area V1. We modeled these mechanisms using sparse Hebbian learning algorithms. These algorithms alternate a coding step to encode the information with a learning step to find the proper encoder. A major difficulty faced by these algorithms is to deduce a good representation while knowing immature encoders, and to learn good encoders with a non-optimal representation. To address this problem, we propose to introduce a new regulation process between learning and coding, called homeostasis. Our homeostasis is compatible with a neuro-mimetic architecture and allows for the fast emergence of localized filters sensitive to orientation. The key to this algorithm lies in a simple adaptation mechanism based on non-linear functions that reconciles the antagonistic processes that occur at the coding and learning time scales. We tested this unsupervised algorithm with this homeostasis rule for a range of existing unsupervised learning algorithms coupled with different neural coding algorithms. In addition, we propose a simplification of this optimal homeostasis rule by implementing a simple heuristic on the probability of activation of neurons. Compared to the optimal homeostasis rule, we show that this heuristic allows to implement a more rapid unsupervised learning algorithm while keeping a large part of its effectiveness. These results demonstrate the potential application of such a strategy in machine learning and we illustrate this with one result in a convolutional neural network.","url_abs":"https://openreview.net/forum?id=SyMras0cFQ","url_pdf":"https://openreview.net/pdf?id=SyMras0cFQ","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"an-adaptive-homeostatic-algorithm-for-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/bicv/SHL_scripts","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}