%A Nathan Intrator %A Shimon Edelman %T How to Make a Low-Dimensional Representation Suitable for Diverse Tasks %X We consider training classifiers for multiple tasks as a method for improving generalization and obtaining a better low-dimensional representation. To that end, we introduce a hybrid training methodology for MLP networks; the utility of the hidden-unit representation is assessed by embedding it into a 2D space using multidimensional scaling. The proposed methodology is tested on a highly nonlinear image classification task. %D 1996 %L cogprints571