Nonlinear-Dynamical Attention Allocation via Information Geometry

Inspired by a broader perspective viewing intelligent system dynamics in terms of the geometry of ”cognitive spaces,” we conduct a preliminary investigation of the application of information-geometry based learning to ECAN (Economic Attention Networks), the component of the integrative OpenCog AGI system concerned with attention allocation and credit assignment. We generalize Amari’s ”natural gradient” algorithm for network learning to encompass ECAN and other recurrent networks, and apply it to small example cases of ECAN, demonstrating a dramatic improvement in the effectiveness of attention allocation compared to prior (Hebbian learning like) ECAN methods. Scaling up the method to deal with realistically-sized ECAN networks as used in OpenCog remains for the future, but should be achievable using sparse matrix methods on GPUs.