  We propose a new neurally-inspired model that can learn to encode the global
relationship context of visual events across time and space and to use the
contextual information to modulate the analysis by synthesis process in a
predictive coding framework. The model learns latent contextual representations
by maximizing the predictability of visual events based on local and global
contextual information through both top-down and bottom-up processes. In
contrast to standard predictive coding models, the prediction error in this
model is used to update the contextual representation but does not alter the
feedforward input for the next layer, and is thus more consistent with
neurophysiological observations. We establish the computational feasibility of
this model by demonstrating its ability in several aspects. We show that our
model can outperform state-of-art performances of gated Boltzmann machines
(GBM) in estimation of contextual information. Our model can also interpolate
missing events or predict future events in image sequences while simultaneously
estimating contextual information. We show it achieves state-of-art
performances in terms of prediction accuracy in a variety of tasks and
possesses the ability to interpolate missing frames, a function that is lacking
in GBM.
