Toward Neuromic Computing: Neurons as Autoencoders

The computational capabilities of dendrites have become increasingly clear. This letter presents the idea that neural backpropagation is using dendritic processing to enable individual neurons to perform autoencoding. Using a very simple connection weight search heuristic and artificial neural network model, the effects of interleaving autoencoding for each neuron in a hidden layer of a feedforward network are explored. This is contrasted to the standard layered approach to autoencoding. It is shown that such individualised processing is not detrimental and can improve network learning.