Feedforward neural network

Simplified example of training a neural network for object detection: The network is trained on multiple images depicting either starfish or sea urchins, which are correlated with "nodes" that represent visual features. The starfish match with a ringed texture and a star outline, whereas most sea urchins match with a striped texture and oval shape. However, the instance of a ring-textured sea urchin creates a weakly weighted association between them.
Subsequent run of the network on an input image (left): The network correctly detects the starfish. However, the weakly weighted association between ringed texture and sea urchin also confers a weak signal to the latter from one of two intermediate nodes. In addition, a shell that was not included in the training gives a weak signal for the oval shape, also resulting in a weak signal for the sea urchin output. These weak signals may result in a false positive result for sea urchin.
In reality, textures and outlines would not be represented by single nodes, but rather by associated weight patterns of multiple nodes.

Feedforward refers to recognition-inference architecture of neural networks. Artificial neural network architectures are based on inputs multiplied by weights to obtain outputs (inputs-to-output): feedforward. Recurrent neural networks, or neural networks with loops allow information from later processing stages to feed back to earlier stages for sequence processing. However, at every stage of inference a feedforward multiplication remains the core, essential for backpropagation or backpropagation through time. Thus neural networks cannot contain feedback like negative feedback or positive feedback where the outputs feed back to the very same inputs and modify them, because this forms an infinite loop which is not possible to rewind in time to generate an error signal through backpropagation. This issue and nomenclature appear to be a point of confusion between some computer scientists and scientists in other fields studying brain networks.

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