Task Decomposition Through Competition in a Modular Connectionist Architecture: The What and Where Vision Tasks

• Published in: Cognitive science 1991-04, Vol.15 (2), p.219-250
• Main Authors: Jacobs, Robert A., Jordan, Michael I., Barto, Andrew G.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Perception; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Vision
• ISSN: 0364-0213; 1551-6709
• DOI: 10.1207/s15516709cog1502_2

A novel modular connectionist architecture is presented in which the networks composing the architecture compete to learn the training patterns. An outcome of the competition is that different networks learn different training patterns and, thus, learn to compute different functions. The architecture performs task decomposition in the sense that it learns to partition a task into two or more functionally independent tasks and allocates distinct networks to learn each task. In addition, the architecture tends to allocate to each task the network whose topology is most appropriate to that task. The architecture's performance on “what” and “where” vision tasks is presented and compared with the performance of two multilayer networks. Finally, it is noted that function decomposition is an underconstrained problem, and, thus, different modular architectures may decompose a function in different ways. A desirable decomposition can be achieved if the architecture is suitably restricted in the types of functions that it can compute. Finding appropriate restrictions is possible through the application of domain knowledge. A strength of the modular architecture is that its structure is well suited for incorporating domain knowledge.