Sparsely-connected associative memory models with displaced connectivity.

Our work is concerned with finding optimum connection strategies in high-performance associative memory models. Taking inspiration from axonal branching in biological neurons, we impose a displacement of the point of efferent arborisation, so that the output from each node travels a certain distance before branching to connect to other units. This technique is applied to networks constructed with a connectivity profile based on Gaussian distributions, and the results compared to those obtained with a network containing purely local connections, displaced in the same manner. It is found that displacement of the point of arborisation has a very beneficial effect on the performance of both network types, with the displaced locally-connected network performing the best.