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Related papers: Synaptic plasticity as Bayesian inference

200 papers

Biological synapses effortlessly balance memory retention and flexibility, yet artificial neural networks still struggle with the extremes of catastrophic forgetting and catastrophic remembering. Here, we introduce Metaplasticity from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Djohan Bonnet , Kellian Cottart , Tifenn Hirtzlin , Tarcisius Januel , Thomas Dalgaty , Elisa Vianello , Damien Querlioz

Synaptic plasticity or the ability of a brain to changes one or more of its functions or structures has generated and is sill generating a lot of interest from the scientific community especially neuroscientists. These interests especially…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-03-28 Eddy Kwessi

Underpinning the past decades of work on the design, initialization, and optimization of neural networks is a seemingly innocuous assumption: that the network is trained on a \textit{stationary} data distribution. In settings where this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Clare Lyle , Zeyu Zheng , Khimya Khetarpal , Hado van Hasselt , Razvan Pascanu , James Martens , Will Dabney

Deep continual learning requires models to adapt to new tasks without retraining from scratch. However, neural networks can lose their ability to adapt to new tasks after training on previous ones, a phenomenon known as loss of plasticity.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiuqi Wang , Jayanth Srinivasa , Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Ali Payani , Shangtong Zhang

Cortical sensory neurons are known to be highly variable, in the sense that responses evoked by identical stimuli often change dramatically from trial to trial. The origin of this variability is uncertain, but it is usually interpreted as…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2007-05-23 Gleb Basalyga , Emilio Salinas

Theoretical models of neuronal function consider different mechanisms through which networks learn, classify and discern inputs. A central focus of these models is to understand how associations are established amongst neurons, in order to…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2015-05-19 Harold P. de Vladar , Eörs Szathmáry

Scenarios requiring humans to choose from multiple seemingly optimal actions are commonplace, however standard imitation learning often fails to capture this behavior. Instead, an over-reliance on replicating expert actions induces…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Hanbit Oh , Hikaru Sasaki , Brendan Michael , Takamitsu Matsubara

Synapses change on multiple timescales, ranging from milliseconds to minutes, due to a combination of both short- and long-term plasticity. Here we develop an extension of the common Generalized Linear Model to infer both short- and…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-08-15 Ganchao Wei , Ian H. Stevenson

Catastrophic forgetting remains a challenge for neural networks, especially in lifelong learning scenarios. In this study, we introduce MEtaplasticity from Synaptic Uncertainty (MESU), inspired by metaplasticity and Bayesian inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Djohan Bonnet , Tifenn Hirtzlin , Tarcisius Januel , Thomas Dalgaty , Damien Querlioz , Elisa Vianello

Neural responses in the cortex change over time both systematically, due to ongoing plasticity and learning, and seemingly randomly, due to various sources of noise and variability. Most previous work considered each of these processes,…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2018-07-25 Laurence Aitchison , Guillaume Hennequin , Mate Lengyel

The inability of artificial neural networks to assess the uncertainty of their predictions is an impediment to their widespread use. We distinguish two types of learnable uncertainty: model uncertainty due to a lack of training data and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Hans Weytjens , Jochen De Weerdt

Parallels between the signal processing tasks and biological neurons lead to an understanding of the principles of self-organized optimization of input signal recognition. In the present paper, we discuss such similarities among biological…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2021-08-03 Oleg Nikitin , Olga Lukyanova , Alex Kunin

In this paper, we derive a new model of synaptic plasticity, based on recent algorithms for reinforcement learning (in which an agent attempts to learn appropriate actions to maximize its long-term average reward). We show that these direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Peter L. Bartlett , Jonathan Baxter

Hebbian learning is a key principle underlying learning in biological neural networks. We relate a Hebbian spike-timing-dependent plasticity rule to noisy gradient descent with respect to a non-convex loss function on the probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Niklas Dexheimer , Sascha Gaudlitz , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

There are two major types of uncertainty one can model. Aleatoric uncertainty captures noise inherent in the observations. On the other hand, epistemic uncertainty accounts for uncertainty in the model -- uncertainty which can be explained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-10-06 Alex Kendall , Yarin Gal

The problem of statistical inference for open chaotic systems measured with error is complicated by the interaction of the uncertainty introduced by chaos, and the various sources of random or external variation. Here a method of…

Applications · Statistics 2024-03-11 Michael LuValle

A popular strategy for active learning is to specifically target a reduction in epistemic uncertainty, since aleatoric uncertainty is often considered as being intrinsic to the system of interest and therefore not reducible. Yet,…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-12 Jake Thomas , Jeremie Houssineau

Bayesian neural networks utilize probabilistic layers that capture uncertainty over weights and activations, and are trained using Bayesian inference. Since these probabilistic layers are designed to be drop-in replacement of their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Daniel T. Chang

Contemporary machine learning methods will try to approach the Bayes error, as it is the lowest possible error any model can achieve. This paper postulates that any decision is composed of not one but two Bayesian decisions and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Stefan Jaeger

While deep neural networks have surpassed human performance in multiple situations, they are prone to catastrophic forgetting: upon training a new task, they rapidly forget previously learned ones. Neuroscience studies, based on idealized…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-03-24 Axel Laborieux , Maxence Ernoult , Tifenn Hirtzlin , Damien Querlioz