UC Berkeley

This dissertation covers my attempts to confront the challenge and promise of multiplicative representations, and their attendant factorization problems, in the brain. This is grounded in a paradigm for modeling cognition that defines an algebra over high-dimensional vectors and presents a compelling factorization problem. The proposed solution to this problem, a recurrent neural network architecture called Resonator Networks, has several interesting properties that make it uniquely effective on this problem and may provide some principles for designing a new class of neural network models. I show some applications of multiplicative distributed codes for representing visual scenes and suggest how such representations may be a useful tool for unifying symbolic and connectionist theories of intelligence.