The computational capabilities of dendrites have become increasingly clear. This letter 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.

翻译：树突的计算能力已日益明确。本文提出一种观点：神经反向传播利用树突处理机制，使单个神经元能够执行自编码功能。通过采用极为简单的连接权重搜索启发式算法与人工神经网络模型，我们探究了在前馈网络隐藏层中为每个神经元交替进行自编码的效果，并将其与标准的层级式自编码方法进行对比。研究表明，这种个体化处理不仅无损网络性能，反而能够提升网络学习能力。