Some more

Artificial Neural
Network
• Neural Networks
• Genetic Algorithms
• Genetic Programming
• Behavior-Based Systems
 Background

- Neural Networks can be :

- Biological models

- Artificial models

- Desire to produce artificial systems capable of

sophisticated computations similar to the human
brain.
Biological analogy and some main
ideas
• The brain is composed of a mass of interconnected
neurons
– each neuron is connected to many other neurons

• Neurons transmit signals to each other

• Whether a signal is transmitted is an all-or-nothing

event (the electrical potential in the cell body of the
neuron is thresholded)

• Whether a signal is sent, depends on the strength of

the bond (synapse) between two neurons
 How Does the Brain Work ? (1)
NEURON

- The cell that performs information processing in the brain.

- Fundamental functional unit of all nervous system tissue.

 How Does the Brain Work ? (2)
Each consists of :
SOMA, DENDRITES, AXON, and SYNAPSE.
 Brain vs. Digital Computers (1)
- Computers require hundreds of cycles to simulate
a firing of a neuron.

- The brain can fire all the neurons in a single step.

Parallelism

- Serial computers require billions of cycles to

perform some tasks but the brain takes less than
a second.
e.g. Face Recognition
 Comparison of Brain and
computer

Human Computer
Processing 100 Billion 10 Million
Elements neurons gates
Interconnects 1000 per A few
neuron
Cycles per sec 1000 500 Million
2X 200,000 2 Years
improvement Years
Brain vs. Digital Computers (2)

Future : combine parallelism of the brain with the

switching speed of the computer.
 History
• 1943: McCulloch & Pitts show that neurons can be
combined to construct a Turing machine (using
ANDs, Ors, & NOTs)

• 1958: Rosenblatt shows that perceptrons will

converge if what they are trying to learn can be
represented

• 1969: Minsky & Papert showed the limitations of

perceptrons, killing research for a decade

• 1985: backpropagation algorithm revitalizes the field

 Definition of Neural Network

A Neural Network is a system composed of

many simple processing elements operating in

parallel which can acquire, store, and utilize

experiential knowledge.
 What is
Artificial
Neural
Network?
 Neurons vs. Units (1)

- Each element of NN is a node called unit.

- Units are connected by links.

- Each link has a numeric weight.

 Neurons vs units (2)
Real neuron is far
away from our
simplified model - unit

Chemistry,
biochemistry,
quantumness.
 Computing Elements

A typical unit:
 Planning in building a Neural Network

Decisions must be taken on the

following:

- The number of units to use.

- The type of units required.

- Connection between the units.

 How NN learns a task.
Issues to be discussed
- Initializing the weights.

- Use of a learning algorithm.

- Set of training examples.

- Encode the examples as inputs.

- Convert output into meaningful results.

 Neural Network Example

Figure 19.7. A very simple, two-layer, feed-forward network with

two inputs, two hidden nodes, and one output node.
 Simple Computations in this network

- There are 2 types of components: Linear and

Non-linear.

- Linear: Input function

- calculate weighted sum of all inputs.

- Non-linear: Activation function

- transform sum into activation level.
 Calculations

Input function:

Activation function g:
 A Computing Unit.
Now in more detail but for a
particular model only

Figure 19.4. A unit

 Activation Functions

- Use different functions to obtain different models.

- 3 most common choices :

1) Step function
2) Sign function
3) Sigmoid function

- An output of 1 represents firing of a neuron down

the axon.
Step Function Perceptrons
3 Activation Functions
Are current computer a wrong
model of thinking?

• Humans can’t be doing the sequential

analysis we are studying

– Neurons are a million times slower than gates

– Humans don’t need to be rebooted or

debugged when one bit dies.
 100-step program constraint
• Neurons operate on the order of 10-3 seconds

• Humans can process information in a fraction

of a second (face recognition)

• Hence, at most a couple of hundred serial

operations are possible

• That is, even in parallel, no “chain of

reasoning” can involve more than 100 -1000
steps
 Standard structure of an artificial neural
network
• Input units
– represents the input as a fixed-length vector of numbers
(user defined)
• Hidden units
– calculate thresholded weighted sums of the inputs
– represent intermediate calculations that the network
learns
• Output units
– represent the output as a fixed length vector of numbers
 Representations
• Logic rules
– If color = red ^ shape = square then +
• Decision trees
– tree
• Nearest neighbor
– training examples
• Probabilities
– table of probabilities
Can be used for all of
• Neural networks them
– inputs in [0, 1] Many variants exist
Notations
Notation
Notation (cont.)
 Operation of individual units
• Outputi = f(Wi,j * Inputj + Wi,k * Inputk + Wi,l *
Inputl)
– where f(x) is a threshold (activation) function
– f(x) = 1 / (1 + e-Output)
• “sigmoid”
– f(x) = step function
Artificial Neural
Networks
 Units in Action

- Individual units representing Boolean functions

Network Structures
Feed-forward neural nets:
Links can only go in one direction.

Recurrent neural nets:

Links can go anywhere and form arbitrary
topologies.
 Feed-forward Networks

- Arranged in layers.

- Each unit is linked only in the unit in next layer.

- No units are linked between the same layer, back to

the previous layer or skipping a layer.

- Computations can proceed uniformly from input to

output units.

- No internal state exists.

 Feed-Forward Example

H3 H5
I1
W35 = 1
W13 = -1 t = -0.5 t = 1.5

W57 = 1
I1
W25 = 1

O7 t = 0.5

W16 = 1
I2
W67 = 1
W24= -1 t = -0.5
t = 1.5
W46 = 1

H4 H6

Inputs skip the layer in this case

Multi-layer Networks and Perceptrons

- Have one or more - Networks without hidden

layers of hidden units. layer are called
perceptrons.
- With two possibly
very large hidden - Perceptrons are very
layers, it is possible limited in what they can
to implement any represent, but this makes
function. their learning problem
much simpler.
 Recurrent Network (1)

- The brain is not and cannot be a feed-forward network.

- Allows activation to be fed back to the previous unit.

- Internal state is stored in its activation level.

- Can become unstable

-Can oscillate.
 Recurrent Network (2)

- May take long time to compute a stable output.

- Learning process is much more difficult.

- Can implement more complex designs.

- Can model certain systems with internal states.

Perceptrons
 Perceptrons
- First studied in the late 1950s.

- Also known as Layered Feed-Forward Networks.

- The only efficient learning element at that time was

for single-layered networks.

- Today, used as a synonym for a single-layer,

feed-forward network.
Fig. 19.8. Perceptrons
Perceptrons
Sigmoid Perceptron
 Perceptron learning rule
• Teacher specifies the desired output for a given input

• Network calculates what it thinks the output should be

• Network changes its weights in proportion to the error

between the desired & calculated results

• wi,j =  * [teacheri - outputi] * inputj

– where:
–  is the learning rate; Delta rule
– teacheri - outputi is the error term;
– and inputj is the input activation

• wi,j = wi,j + wi,j

 Adjusting perceptron weights
• wi,j =  * [teacheri - outputi] * inputj
• missi is (teacheri - outputi)
miss<0 miss=0 miss>0
input < 0 alpha 0 -alpha
input = 0 0 0 0
input > 0 -alpha 0 alpha

• Adjust each wi,j based on inputj and missi

• The above table shows adaptation.
• Incremental learning.
 Node biases
• A node’s output is a weighted function of
its inputs

• What is a bias?
• How can we learn the bias value?

• Answer: treat them like just another weight

 Training biases ()
• A node’s output:
bias
– 1 if w1x1 + w2x2 + … + wnxn >= 
– 0 otherwise
• Rewrite
– w1x1 + w2x2 + … + wnxn -  >= 0
– w1x1 + w2x2 + … + wnxn + (-1) >= 0

• Hence, the bias is just another weight whose

activation is always -1

• Just add one more input unit to the network

topology
 Perceptron convergence
theorem
• If a set of <input, output> pairs are
learnable (representable), the delta rule
will find the necessary weights
– in a finite number of steps
– independent of initial weights

• However, a single layer perceptron can

only learn linearly separable concepts
– it works iff gradient descent works
 Linear separability
• Consider a perceptron

• Its output is
– 1, if W1X1 + W2X2 > 
– 0, otherwise

• In terms of feature space

– hence, it can only classify examples if a line (hyperplane
more generally) can separate the positive examples
from the negative examples
 What can Perceptrons Represent ?

- Some complex Boolean function can be

represented.

For example:
Majority function - will be covered in this lecture.

- Perceptrons are limited in the Boolean functions

they can represent.
The Separability Problem and EXOR
trouble

Figure 19.9. Linear Separability in

Perceptrons
AND and OR linear Separators
 Separation in n-1 dimensions

majority

Example of
3Dimensional space
 Perceptrons & XOR
• XOR function

Input1 Input2 Output

0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 0
– no way to draw a line to separate the positive
from negative examples
How do we compute XOR?
Learning Linearly Separable Functions (1)

What can these functions learn ?

Bad news:
- There are not many linearly separable functions.

Good news:
- There is a perceptron algorithm that will learn
any linearly separable function, given enough
training examples.
Learning Linearly Separable Functions (2)

Most neural network learning algorithms, including the

perceptrons learning method, follow the current-best-

hypothesis (CBH) scheme.

Learning Linearly Separable Functions (3)

- Initial network has a randomly assigned weights.

- Learning is done by making small adjustments in the

weights to reduce the difference between the observed and
predicted values.

- Main difference from the logical algorithms is the need to

repeat the update phase several times in order to achieve
convergence.

-Updating process is divided into epochs.

-Each epoch updates all the weights of the process.

Figure 19.11. The Generic Neural Network
Learning Method: adjust the weights until predicted
output values O and true values T agree
e are examples from set
examples
Two types of networks were
compared for the restaurant
problem

Examples of Feed-Forward Learning

Multi-Layer
Neural Nets
Feed Forward
Networks
2-layer Feed Forward example
 Need for hidden units
• If there is one layer of enough hidden
units, the input can be recoded (perhaps
just memorized; example)

• This recoding allows any mapping to be

represented

• Problem: how can the weights of the

hidden units be trained?
XOR Solution
Majority of 11 Inputs
(any 6 or more)
Perceptron is
better than DT
on majority
Constructive
induction is even
better than NN
How many times
in battlefield the
robot recognizes
majority?
 Other Examples
• Need more than a 1-layer network for:
– Parity
– Error Correction
– Connected Paths
• Neural nets do well with
– continuous inputs and outputs
• But poorly with
– logical combinations of boolean inputs

Give DT brain to a mathematician robot and a NN brain

to a soldier robot
WillWait Restaurant example

Here decision
tree is better
than
perceptron

Let us not dramatize “universal”

benchmarks too much
 N-layer FeedForward
Network
• Layer 0 is input nodes

• Layers 1 to N-1 are hidden nodes

• Layer N is output nodes

• All nodes at any layer k are connected to all nodes at

layer k+1

• There are no cycles

 Linear Threshold Units

2 Layer FF net with LTUs

• 1 output layer + 1 hidden layer
– Therefore, 2 stages to “assign reward”

• Can compute functions with convex regions

• Each hidden node acts like a perceptron,

learning a separating line

• Output units can compute intersections of half-

planes given by hidden units
Feed-forward NN with hidden
layer
Reactive architecture based
on NN for a simple robot

• Braitenberg Vehicles
• Quantum Neural BV
Evaluation of a Feedforward NN using software is easy
Set bias input neuron

Calculate activation of hidden neurons

Calculate output neurons

Take from hidden

neurons and multiply
by weights