Related papers: A novel plasticity rule can explain the developmen…
A recent experiment suggests that neural circuits may alternatively implement continuous or discrete attractors, depending on the training set up. In recurrent neural network models, continuous and discrete attractors are separately modeled…
Neuronal circuits internally regulate electrical signaling via a host of homeostatic mechanisms. Two prominent mechanisms, synaptic scaling and structural plasticity, are believed to maintain average activity within an operating range by…
In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…
Intrinsic Motivation (IM) aims to train agents without external rewards, enabling useful behavior to emerge from the agent's interaction with its environment alone. However, the dominant IM approaches rely on information-theoretic…
Learning is based on synaptic plasticity, which affects and is driven by neural activity. Because pre- and postsynaptic spiking activity is shaped by randomness, the synaptic weights follow a stochastic process, requiring a probabilistic…
Adaptation of behavior requires the brain to change goals in a changing environment. Synaptic learning has demonstrated its effectiveness in changing the probability of selecting actions based on their outcome. In the extreme case, it is…
The brain is believed to operate in part by making predictions about sensory stimuli and encoding deviations from these predictions in the activity of "prediction error neurons." This principle defines the widely influential theory of…
We present an unsupervised, local activation-dependent learning rule for intrinsic plasticity (IP) which affects the composition of ion channel conductances for single neurons in a use-dependent way. We use a single-compartment…
Deep artificial neural networks famously struggle to learn from non-stationary streams of data. Without dedicated mitigation strategies, continual learning is associated with continuous forgetting of previous tasks and a progressive loss of…
Learning in the brain requires complementary mechanisms: potentiation and activity-dependent homeostatic scaling. We introduce synaptic scaling to a biologically-realistic spiking model of neocortex which can learn changes in oscillatory…
In both neuroscience and artificial intelligence, popular functional frameworks and neural network formulations operate by making use of extrinsic error measurements and global learning algorithms. Through a set of conjectures based on…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
This paper presents a spike-based model which employs neurons with functionally distinct dendritic compartments for classifying high dimensional binary patterns. The synaptic inputs arriving on each dendritic subunit are nonlinearly…
Neuropeptides, members of a large and evolutionarily ancient family of proteinaceous cell-cell signaling molecules, are widely recognized as extremely potent regulators of brain function and behavior. At the cellular level, neuropeptides…
The brain is formed by cortical regions that are associated with different cognitive functions. Neurons within the same region are more likely to connect than neurons in distinct regions, making the brain network to have characteristics of…
Natural groups of animals, such as swarms of social insects, exhibit astonishing degrees of task specialization, useful to address complex tasks and to survive. This is supported by phenotypic plasticity: individuals sharing the same…
Elastic systems driven in a disordered medium exhibit a depinning transition at zero temperature and a creep regime at finite temperature and slow drive $f$. We derive functional renormalization group equations which allow to describe in…
Despite the striking successes of deep neural networks trained with gradient-based optimization, these methods differ fundamentally from their biological counterparts. This gap raises key questions about how nature achieves robust,…
The accumulation of adaptations in an open-ended manner during lifetime learning is a holy grail in reinforcement learning, intrinsic motivation, artificial curiosity, and developmental robotics. We present a specification for a cognitive…
Recently, the use of bio-inspired learning techniques such as Hebbian learning and its closely-related Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) variant have drawn significant attention for the design of compute-efficient AI systems that can…