Unsupervised Local Plasticity in a Multi-Frequency VisNet Hierarchy

We introduce an unsupervised visual representation learning system based entirely on local plasticity rules, without labels, backpropagation, or global error signals. The model is a VisNet-inspired hierarchical architecture combining opponent color inputs, multi-frequency Gabor and wavelet feature streams, competitive normalization with lateral inhibition, saliency modulation, associative memory, and a feedback loop. All representation learning occurs through continuous local plasticity applied to unlabeled image streams over 300 epochs. Performance is evaluated using a fixed linear probe trained only at readout time. The system achieves 80.1 percent accuracy on CIFAR-10 and 47.6 percent on CIFAR-100, improving over a Hebbian-only baseline. Ablation studies show that anti-Hebbian decorrelation, free-energy inspired plasticity, and associative memory are the main contributors, with strong synergistic effects. Even without learning, the fixed architecture alone reaches 61.4 percent on CIFAR-10, indicating that plasticity, not only inductive bias, drives most of the performance. Control analyses show that independently trained probes match co-trained ones within 0.3 percentage points, and a nearest-class-mean classifier achieves 78.3 percent without gradient-based training, confirming the intrinsic structure of the learned features. Overall, the system narrows but does not eliminate the performance gap to backpropagation-trained CNNs (5.7 percentage points on CIFAR-10, 7.5 percentage points on CIFAR-100), demonstrating that structured local plasticity alone can learn strong visual representations from raw unlabeled data.