A Transformation for Implementing Efficient Dynamic Backpropagation Neural Networks

Most Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have a fixed topology during learning, and often suffer from a number of short-comings as a result. Variations of ANNs that use dynamic topologies have shown ability to overcome many of these problems. This paper introduces Location-Independent Transformations (LITs) as a general strategy for implementing distributed feedforward networks that use dynamic topologies (dynamic ANNs) efficiently in parallel hardware. A LIT creates a set of location-independent nodes, where each node computes its part of the network output independent of other nodes, using local information. This type of transformation allows efficient support for adding and deleting nodes dynamically during learning. In particular, this paper presents an LIT for standard Backpropagation with two layers of weights, and shows how dynamic extensions to Backpropagation can be supported.