Generalization at Retrieval Using Associative Networks with Transient Weight Changes

Abstract

Without having seen a bigram like “her buffalo”, you can easily tell that it is congruent because “buffalo” can be aligned with more common nouns like “cat” or “dog” that have been seen in contexts like “her cat” or “her dog”—the novel bigram structurally aligns with representations in memory. We present a new class of associative nets we call Dynamic-Eigen-Nets, and provide simulations that show how they generalize to patterns that are structurally aligned with the training domain. Linear-Associative-Nets respond with the same pattern regardless of input, motivating the introduction of saturation to facilitate other response states. However, models using saturation cannot readily generalize..