  We explore the effect of introducing prior information into the intermediate
level of neural networks for a learning task on which all the state-of-the-art
machine learning algorithms tested failed to learn. We motivate our work from
the hypothesis that humans learn such intermediate concepts from other
individuals via a form of supervision or guidance using a curriculum. The
experiments we have conducted provide positive evidence in favor of this
hypothesis. In our experiments, a two-tiered MLP architecture is trained on a
dataset with 64x64 binary inputs images, each image with three sprites. The
final task is to decide whether all the sprites are the same or one of them is
different. Sprites are pentomino tetris shapes and they are placed in an image
with different locations using scaling and rotation transformations. The first
part of the two-tiered MLP is pre-trained with intermediate-level targets being
the presence of sprites at each location, while the second part takes the
output of the first part as input and predicts the final task's target binary
event. The two-tiered MLP architecture, with a few tens of thousand examples,
was able to learn the task perfectly, whereas all other algorithms (include
unsupervised pre-training, but also traditional algorithms like SVMs, decision
trees and boosting) all perform no better than chance. We hypothesize that the
optimization difficulty involved when the intermediate pre-training is not
performed is due to the {\em composition} of two highly non-linear tasks. Our
findings are also consistent with hypotheses on cultural learning inspired by
the observations of optimization problems with deep learning, presumably
because of effective local minima.
