I want to find a working implementation of the 1996 Nature paper Emergence of simple-cell receptive field properties by learning a sparse code for natural images or the authors' other paper with more details published on Vision Research Sparse coding with an overcomplete basis set: a strategy employed by V1? to help me learn their method.
They have a matlab version calling c implementation of fast conjugate gradient here. However I haven't successfully made in run on my computer. Does anyone have code available (preferably in python) reproduced their results?
Another question is what is the reasoning behind the "rate parameter for the gain adjustment" $\alpha$ in Eq.(18) of the second paper?
[link][comment]