Eigenvector Dreaming

Among the performance-enhancing procedures for Hopfield-type networks that implement associative memory, Hebbian Unlearning (or dreaming) strikes for its simplicity and its clear biological interpretation. Yet, it does not easily lend itself to a clear analytical understanding. Here we show how Hebbian Unlearning can be effectively described in terms of a simple evolution of the spectrum and the eigenvectors of the coupling matrix. We use these ideas to design new dreaming algorithms that are effective from a computational point of view, and are analytically far more transparent than the original scheme.

Forgetting Memories and their Attractiveness

We study numerically the memory which forgets, introduced in 1986 by Parisi by bounding the synaptic strength, with a mechanism which avoid confusion, allows to remember the pattern learned more recently and has a physiologically very well defined meaning. We analyze a number of features of the learning at finite number of neurons and finite number of patterns. We discuss how the system behaves in the large but finite N limit. We analyze the basin of attraction of the patterns that have been learned, and we show that it is exponentially small in the age of the pattern. This is a clearly non physiological feature of the model.