NeoRL – Self-Sustaining Predictions

Hello!

Just a small post on an update to my NeoRL algorithm.

A while ago, I showed an MNIST prediction demo. Many rightfully thought that it may just be learning an identity mapping. But, with some slight modifications I can show that the algorithm does indeed predict properly and does so fully online.

I changed the SDRs to binary, this way there is no decay/explosion when continuously feeding its own predictions as input. So I can now run NeoRL’s predictive hierarchy (without RL) on itself indefinitely. It simplifies the digits to noisy blobs (since the digits are chosen randomly, it can’t predict uniform randomness), but the movement trajectories are preserved.

Another interesting thing is how fast it learns this – I trained it for about 1 minute to get the video below. It also ran in real-time while training (I didn’t write a “speed mode” in the demo yet).

The binary SDRs do have some downsides though. While the indefinite predictions thing is interesting, the binary SDRs sacrifice some representational power by removing the ability to have scalar SDRs.

So here’s a video. The first half shows it just predicting the next frame based on the input on the left. Then in the second half, the input on the left is ignored (it is not fed into the agent at all), rather the agent’s own predictions are used as input. As a result, it plays a sort of video of its own knowledge of the input.

Until next time!

4 thoughts on “NeoRL – Self-Sustaining Predictions”

  1. One demo I’d like to see would be next frame prediction like this but with a bouncing ball, would be cool to see if it could pick up the concept of bounce and wall as quick as it did with this.

    Very very good job btw. This is incredibly neat.

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