Recurrent correlation associative memories: a feature space perspective

In this paper, we analyze a model of recurrent kernel associative memory (RKAM) recently proposed by Garcia and Moreno. We show that this model consists in a kernelization of the recurrent correlation associative memory (RCAM) of Chiueh and Goodman. In particular, using an exponential kernel, we obtain a generalization of the well-known exponential correlation associative memory (ECAM), while using a polynomial kernel, we obtain a generalization of higher order Hopfield networks with Hebbian weights. We show that the RKAM can outperform the aforementioned associative memory models, becoming equivalent to them when a dominance condition is fulfilled by the kernel matrix. To ascertain the dominance condition, we propose a statistical measure which can be easily computed from the probability distribution of the interpattern Hamming distance or directly estimated from the memory vectors. The RKAM can be used below saturation to realize associative memories with reduced dynamic range with respect to the ECAM and with reduced number of synaptic coefficients with respect to higher order Hopfield networks.