Abstract-Relaxation labeling processes have been widely used in many different domains including image processing, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence. They are iterative procedures that aim at reducing local ambiguities and achieving global consistency through a parallel exploitation of contextual information, which is quantitatively expressed in terms of a set of “compatibility coefficients. ” The problem of determining compatibility coefficients has received a considerable attention in the past and many heuristic, statistical-based methods have been suggested. In this paper, we propose a rather different viewpoint to solve this problem: we derive them attempting to optimize the performance of the relaxation algorithm over a sample of training data; no statistical interpretation is given: compatibility coefficients are simply interpreted as real numbers, for which performance is optimal. Experimental results over a novel application of relaxation are given, which prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Index Terms- Compatibility coefficients, constraint satisfaction, gradient projection, learning, neural networks, nonlinear

Abstract — The problem of determining the proper size of an artificial neural network is recognized to be crucial, especially for its practical implications in such important issues as learning and generalization. One popular approach tackling this problem is commonly known as pruning and consists of training a larger than necessary network and then removing unnecessary weights/nodes. In this paper, a new pruning method is developed, based on the idea of iteratively eliminating units and adjusting the remaining weights in such a way that the network performance does not worsen over the entire training set. The pruning problem is formulated in terms of solving a system of linear equations, and a very efficient conjugate gradient algorithm is used for solving it, in the least-squares sense. The algorithm also provides a simple criterion for choosing the units to be removed, which has proved to work well in practice. The results obtained over various test problems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Index Terms — Feedforward neural networks, generalization, hidden neurons, iterative methods, least-squares methods, network pruning, pattern recognition, structure simplification. I.