Helping supervised learning with an educated teacher

We study the problem of supervised learning in a scenario with a student, a teacher and a book. The student and teacher learn using the Hebbian learning rule, but while the teacher’s training set comes exclusively from the book, the student receives examples from the book and from the teacher. We show that, if appropriate attention is given to the teacher, the student optimizes the learning of the contents of the book and outperforms the teacher. We investigate this problem in both off-line and on-line approaches.