  We explore whether useful temporal neural generative models can be learned
from sequential data without back-propagation through time. We investigate the
viability of a more neurocognitively-grounded approach in the context of
unsupervised generative modeling of sequences. Specifically, we build on the
concept of predictive coding, which has gained influence in cognitive science,
in a neural framework. To do so we develop a novel architecture, the Temporal
Neural Coding Network, and its learning algorithm, Discrepancy Reduction. The
underlying directed generative model is fully recurrent, meaning that it
employs structural feedback connections and temporal feedback connections,
yielding information propagation cycles that create local learning signals.
This facilitates a unified bottom-up and top-down approach for information
transfer inside the architecture. Our proposed algorithm shows promise on the
bouncing balls generative modeling problem. Further experiments could be
conducted to explore the strengths and weaknesses of our approach.
