Evolving Connections in Group of Neurons for Robust Learning

Artificial neural networks inspired from the learning mechanism of the brain have achieved great successes in machine learning, especially those with deep layers. The commonly used neural networks follow the hierarchical multilayer architecture with no connections between nodes in the same layer. In this article, we propose a new group architectures for neural-network learning. In the new architecture, the neurons are assigned irregularly in a group and a neuron may connect to any neurons in the group. The connections are assigned automatically by optimizing a novel connecting structure learning probabilistic model which is established based on the principle that more relevant input and output nodes deserve a denser connection between them. In order to efficiently evolve the connections, we propose to directly model the architecture without involving weights and biases which significantly reduce the computational complexity of the objective function. The model is optimized via an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm. After the architecture is optimized, the connecting weights and biases are then determined and we find the architecture is robust to corruptions. From experiments, the proposed architecture significantly outperforms existing popular architectures on noise-corrupted images when trained only by pure images.