In which we try to give a basic intuitive sense of what reinforcement learning is and how it differs and relates to other fields, e.g., supervised learning and neural networks, genetic algorithms and artificial life, control theory. Intuitively, RL is trial and error (variation and selection, search) plus learning (association, memory). We argue that RL is the only field that seriously addresses the special features of the problem of learning from interaction to achieve long-term goals.

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Over the last 20 years, several different techniques have been proposed for computer recognition of human faces. The purpose of this paper is to compare two simple but general strategies on a common database (frontal images of faces of 47 people: 26 males and 21 females, four images per person). We have developed and implemented two new algorithms; the first one is based on the computation of a set of geometrical features, such as nose width and length, mouth position, and chin shape, and the second one is based on almost-grey-level template matching. The results obtained on the testing sets (about 90 % correct recognition using geometrical features and perfect recognition using template matching) favor our implementation of the template-matching approach.

We had previously shown that regularization principles lead to approximation schemes which are equivalent to networks with one layer of hidden units, called Regularization Networks. In particular, standard smoothness functionals lead to a subclass of regularization networks, the well known Radial Basis Functions approximation schemes. This paper shows that regularization networks encompass a much broader range of approximation schemes, including many of the popular general additive models and some of the neural networks. In particular, we introduce new classes of smoothness functionals that lead to different classes of basis functions. Additive splines as well as some tensor product splines can be obtained from appropriate classes of smoothness functionals. Furthermore, the same generalization that extends Radial Basis Functions (RBF) to Hyper Basis Functions (HBF) also leads from additive models to ridge approximation models, containing as special cases Breiman's hinge functions, som...

Regularization Networks and Support Vector Machines are techniques for solving certain problems of learning from examples – in particular the regression problem of approximating a multivariate function from sparse data. Radial Basis Functions, for example, are a special case of both regularization and Support Vector Machines. We review both formulations in the context of Vapnik’s theory of statistical learning which provides a general foundation for the learning problem, combining functional analysis and statistics. The emphasis is on regression: classification is treated as a special case.

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A novel modular connectionist architecture is presented in which the networks composing the architecture compete to learn the training patterns. As a result of the competition, 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 vii 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, and tends to allocate the same network to similar tasks and distinct networks to dissimilar tasks. Furthermore, it can be easily modified so as to...

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Modal matching is a new method for establishing correspondences and computing canonical descriptions. The method is based on the idea of describing objects in terms of generalized symmetries, as defined by each object's eigenmodes. The resulting modal description is used for object recognition and categorization, where shape similarities are expressed as the amounts of modal deformation energy needed to align the two objects. In general, modes provide a global-to-local ordering of shape deformation and thus allow for selecting which types of deformations are used in object alignment and comparison. In contrast to previous techniques, which required correspondence to be computed with an initial or prototype shape, modal matching utilizes a new type of finite element formulation that allows for an object's eigenmodes to be computed directly from available image information. This improved formulation provides greater generality and accuracy, and is applicable to data of any dimensionality. Correspondence results with 2-D contour and point feature data are shown, and recognition experiments with 2-D images of hand tools and airplanes are described.

Practical experience has shown that in order to obtain the best possible performance, prior knowledge about invariances of a classification problem at hand ought to be incorporated into the training procedure. We describe and review all known methods for doing so in support vector machines, provide experimental results, and discuss their respective merits. One of the significant new results reported in this work is our recent achievement of the lowest reported test error on the well-known MNIST digit recognition benchmark task, with SVM training times that are also significantly faster than previous SVM methods.