  Progress in deep learning has spawned great successes in many engineering
applications. As a prime example, convolutional neural networks, a type of
feedforward neural networks, are now approaching -- and sometimes even
surpassing -- human accuracy on a variety of visual recognition tasks. Here,
however, we show that these neural networks and their recent extensions
struggle in recognition tasks where co-dependent visual features must be
detected over long spatial ranges. We introduce the horizontal gated-recurrent
unit (hGRU) to learn intrinsic horizontal connections -- both within and across
feature columns. We demonstrate that a single hGRU layer matches or outperforms
all tested feedforward hierarchical baselines including state-of-the-art
architectures which have orders of magnitude more free parameters. We further
discuss the biological plausibility of the hGRU in comparison to anatomical
data from the visual cortex as well as human behavioral data on a classic
contour detection task.
