Toward Neuromic Computing: Neurons as Autoencoders

This short paper 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.