ANN - Bidirectional Associative Memory (BAM)

ANN – Bidirectional Associative Memory (BAM)

Last Updated : 10 Jul, 2020

Bidirectional Associative Memory (BAM) is a supervised learning model in Artificial Neural Network. This is hetero-associative memory, for an input pattern, it returns another pattern which is potentially of a different size. This phenomenon is very similar to the human brain. Human memory is necessarily associative. It uses a chain of mental associations to recover a lost memory like associations of faces with names, in exam questions with answers, etc.
In such memory associations for one type of object with another, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is needed to receive a pattern of one set of neurons as an input and generate a related, but different, output pattern of another set of neurons.

Why BAM is required?
The main objective to introduce such a network model is to store hetero-associative pattern pairs.
This is used to retrieve a pattern given a noisy or incomplete pattern.

BAM Architecture:
When BAM accepts an input of n-dimensional vector X from set A then the model recalls m-dimensional vector Y from set B. Similarly when Y is treated as input, the BAM recalls X.

Algorithm:

Storage (Learning): In this learning step of BAM, weight matrix is calculated between M pairs of patterns (fundamental memories) are stored in the synaptic weights of the network following the equation $W=\sum_{m=1}^{M} X_{m} Y_{m}^{T}$
Testing: We have to check that the BAM recalls perfectly $Y_{m}$ for corresponding $X_{m}$ and recalls $X_{m}$ for corresponding $Y_{m}$ . Using,
$Y_{m}=\operatorname{sign}\left(W^{T} X_{m}\right), \quad m=1.2, \ldots, M\]\[X_{m}=\operatorname{sign}\left(W Y_{m}\right), \quad m=1.2, \ldots, M$

All pairs should be recalled accordingly.
Retrieval: For an unknown vector X (a corrupted or incomplete version of a pattern from set A or B) to the BAM and retrieve a previously stored association:
- Initialize the BAM:
  $X(0)=X, \quad p=0$
- Calculate the BAM output at iteration $p$ :
  $Y(p)=\operatorname{sign}\left[W^{T} X(p)\right]$
- Update the input vector $X(p)$ :
  $X(p+1)=\operatorname{sign}[W Y(p)]$
- Repeat the iteration until convergence, when input and output remain unchanged.

Limitations of BAM:

Storage capacity of the BAM: In the BAM, stored number of associations should not be exceeded the number of neurons in the smaller layer.
Incorrect convergence: Always the closest association may not be produced by BAM.

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