Although the currently popular deep learning networks achieve unprecedented performance on some tasks, the human brain still has a monopoly on general intelligence. Motivated by this and biological implausibility of deep learning networks, we developed a family of biologically plausible artificial neural networks (NNs) for unsupervised learning. Our approach is based on optimizing principled objective functions containing a term that matches the pairwise similarity of outputs to the similarity of inputs, hence the name - similarity-based. Gradient-based online optimization of such similarity-based objective functions can be implemented by NNs with biologically plausible local learning rules. Similarity-based cost functions and associated NNs solve unsupervised learning tasks such as linear dimensionality reduction, sparse and/or nonnegative feature extraction, blind nonnegative source separation, clustering and manifold learning.
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