Signal Conditioning for Learning in the Wild
This work addresses the problem of robust online learning in unpredictable settings for applications like environmental monitoring and species classification, representing an incremental improvement by extending an existing method to new data types.
The paper tackles the challenge of applying a brain-mimetic learning algorithm to diverse, unregulated environments by introducing signal conditioning steps that regularize sensory inputs, enabling a single network to handle multiple classification tasks without hyperparameter adjustments, such as gas sensor data and wild species identification.
The mammalian olfactory system learns rapidly from very few examples, presented in unpredictable online sequences, and then recognizes these learned odors under conditions of substantial interference without exhibiting catastrophic forgetting. We have developed a brain-mimetic algorithm that replicates these properties, provided that sensory inputs adhere to a common statistical structure. However, in natural, unregulated environments, this constraint cannot be assured. We here present a series of signal conditioning steps, inspired by the mammalian olfactory system, that transform diverse sensory inputs into a regularized statistical structure to which the learning network can be tuned. This pre-processing enables a single instantiated network to be applied to widely diverse classification tasks and datasets - here including gas sensor data, remote sensing from spectral characteristics, and multi-label hierarchical identification of wild species - without adjusting network hyperparameters.