Embodiments described herein cover a hierarchical machine learning system with a separated perception subsystem (that includes a hierarchy of nodes having at least a first layer and a second layer) and application subsystem. In one example embodiment a first node in the first layer processes a first input and processes at least a portion of the first input to generate a first feature vector. A second node in the second layer processes a second input comprising at least a portion of the first feature vector to generate a second feature vector. The first node generates a first sparse feature vector from the first feature vector and/or the second node generates a second sparse feature vector from the second feature vector. A third node of the perception subsystem then processes at least one of the first sparse feature vector or the second sparse feature vector to determine an output.