A multi-winner associative memory

We propose a new associative memory named Multi-Winner Associative Memory (MWAM) and study its bidirectional association properties in this paper. The proposed MWAM has two processes for pattern pairs storage: storage process and recall process. For the storage process, the proposed MWAM can represent a half of pattern pair in the distributed representation layer and can store the correspondence of pattern and its representation using the upward weights. In addition, the MWAM can store the correspondence of the distributed representation and the other half of pattern pair in the downward weights. For the recall process, the MWAM can recall information bidirectionally: a half of the stored pattern pair can be recalled by receiving the other half in the input-output layer for any stored pattern pairs.