one-shot learning

[Ross Gayler]

Ernst Dow (ernst at lilly.com) writes (in the context of one-shot or one-trial
learning):

>But in this case, we are talking memorization, not generalization. You may
>be able to identify the painting you saw before, but could you make the
>leap to recognizing all other abstract paintings?

My interest is in analogical retrieval and not one-trial learning (except to
the extent that it is necessary for 'truly cognitive' capabilities).  The
literature on analogy stresses the role that goals play in determining the
apparent similarity (and hence generalisation) of entities.  That is, in
analogy the generalisation pattern emerges at recall time rather than being
completely determined at storage time.  For such a (post-hoc) generaliser
it makes sense to attempt to memorise everything.  This contrasts with the
approach of most BP work where the system learns an internal representation
(read that as set of hidden units and weights) that supports a particular
pre-specified pattern of generalisation.

I realise that there is more to life than analogical recall and some
generalisation is based on literal similarity etc, but I am just stating the
extreme position for simplicity.

Ross Gayler
ross at psych.psy.uq.oz.au