Paul Bertens

Paul Bertens, Seong-Whan Lee

Although Deep Neural Networks have seen great success in recent years through various changes in overall architectures and optimization strategies, their fundamental underlying design remains largely unchanged. Computational neuroscience on the other hand provides more biologically realistic models of neural processing mechanisms, but they are still high level abstractions of the actual experimentally observed behaviour. Here a model is proposed that bridges Neuroscience, Machine Learning and Evolutionary Algorithms to evolve individual soma and synaptic compartment models of neurons in a scalable manner. Instead of attempting to manually derive models for all the observed complexity and diversity in neural processing, we propose an Evolvable Neural Unit (ENU) that can approximate the function of each individual neuron and synapse. We demonstrate that this type of unit can be evolved to mimic Integrate-And-Fire neurons and synaptic Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity. Additionally, by constructing a new type of neural network where each synapse and neuron is such an evolvable neural unit, we show it is possible to evolve an agent capable of learning to solve a T-maze environment task. This network independently discovers spiking dynamics and reinforcement type learning rules, opening up a new path towards biologically inspired artificial intelligence.

Paul Bertens, Anna Guitart, Pei Pei Chen et al.

Video-game players generate huge amounts of data, as everything they do within a game is recorded. In particular, among all the stored actions and behaviors, there is information on the in-game purchases of virtual products. Such information is of critical importance in modern free-to-play titles, where gamers can select or buy a profusion of items during the game in order to progress and fully enjoy their experience. To try to maximize these kind of purchases, one can use a recommendation system so as to present players with items that might be interesting for them. Such systems can better achieve their goal by employing machine learning algorithms that are able to predict the rating of an item or product by a particular user. In this paper we evaluate and compare two of these algorithms, an ensemble-based model (extremely randomized trees) and a deep neural network, both of which are promising candidates for operational video-game recommender engines. Item recommenders can help developers improve the game. But, more importantly, it should be possible to integrate them into the game, so that users automatically get personalized recommendations while playing. The presented models are not only able to meet this challenge, providing accurate predictions of the items that a particular player will find attractive, but also sufficiently fast and robust to be used in operational settings.

Paul Bertens

A new method for the unsupervised learning of sparse representations using autoencoders is proposed and implemented by ordering the output of the hidden units by their activation value and progressively reconstructing the input in this order. This can be done efficiently in parallel with the use of cumulative sums and sorting only slightly increasing the computational costs. Minimizing the difference of this progressive reconstruction with respect to the input can be seen as minimizing the number of active output units required for the reconstruction of the input. The model thus learns to reconstruct optimally using the least number of active output units. This leads to high sparsity without the need for extra hyperparameters, the amount of sparsity is instead implicitly learned by minimizing this progressive reconstruction error. Results of the trained model are given for patches of the CIFAR10 dataset, showing rapid convergence of features and extremely sparse output activations while maintaining a minimal reconstruction error and showing extreme robustness to overfitting. Additionally the reconstruction as function of number of active units is presented which shows the autoencoder learns a rank order code over the input where the highest ranked units correspond to the highest decrease in reconstruction error.