idiotropy

I do not know if this word has been coined yet, but I did not find a suitable word for what I wanted to capture in this notion. There are many cases where there a system is oriented in a usual, canonical, or inoffensive direction. The impetus for this meme came from PixelRNN, where horizontal or row-wise LSTM units are used to scan the image left to right, top to bottom. This is what I would call an inoffensive or canonical, uninteresting choice of traversal. It is a reasonable choice anyone would jump to. On the other hand, diagonal LSTM are employed in PixelRNN, which proceed in a skew direction with respect to the axes of the image. In my ignorance, I picked 'idiotropy' as a suitable label for this sort of phenomenon: an unusual (contextually defined) anisotropy.