ExGate: Externally Controlled Gating for Feature-based Attention in Artificial Neural Networks

11/08/2018

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by   Jarryd Son, et al.

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Perceptual capabilities of artificial systems have come a long way since the advent of deep learning. These methods have proven to be effective, however they are not as efficient as their biological counterparts. Visual attention is a set of mechanisms that are employed in biological visual systems to ease computational load by only processing pertinent parts of the stimuli. This paper addresses the implementation of top-down, feature-based attention in an artificial neural network by use of externally controlled neuron gating. Our results showed a 5 versus a non-gated version, while adding very few parameters. Our gated model also produces more reasonable errors in predictions by drastically reducing prediction of classes that belong to a different category to the true class.