Unsupervised learning of hierarchical representations has been one of the most vibrant research directions in deep learning during recent years. In this work we study biologically inspired unsupervised strategies in neural networks based on local Hebbian learning.

We propose new mechanisms to extend the Bayesian Confidence Propagating Neural Network (BCPNN) architecture, and demonstrate their capability for unsupervised learning of salient hidden representations when tested on the MNIST dataset.