Related papers: Optimal percentage of inhibitory synapses in multi…
Lifelong learning and adaptability are two defining aspects of biological agents. Modern reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have shown significant progress in solving complex tasks, however once training is concluded, the found…
This work carries out a detailed transient analysis of the learning behavior of multi-agent networks, and reveals interesting results about the learning abilities of distributed strategies. Among other results, the analysis reveals how…
During mammalian development the cerebral metabolic rate correlates qualitatively with synaptogenesis, and both often exhibit bimodal temporal profiles. Despite these non-monotonic dependencies, it is found based on empirical data for…
Often the development of novel functional peptides is not amenable to high throughput or purely computational screening methods. Peptides must be synthesized one at a time in a process that does not generate large amounts of data. One way…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…
Synapses are information efficient in the sense that their natural conductance values convey as many bits per Joule as possible, but efficiency falls rapidly if the conductance is forced to deviate from its natural value (Harris et al,…
A common view on the brain learning processes proposes that the three classic learning paradigms -- unsupervised, reinforcement, and supervised -- take place in respectively the cortex, the basal-ganglia, and the cerebellum. However,…
Normalization is a critical operation in neural circuits. In the brain, there is evidence that normalization is implemented via inhibitory interneurons and allows neural populations to adjust to changes in the distribution of their inputs.…
From the point of view of the human brain, continual learning can perform various tasks without mutual interference. An effective way to reduce mutual interference can be found in sparsity and selectivity of neurons. According to Aljundi et…
Many computer vision applications require solving multiple tasks in real-time. A neural network can be trained to solve multiple tasks simultaneously using multi-task learning. This can save computation at inference time as only a single…
Stimulus from the environment that guides behavior and informs decisions is encoded in the firing rates of neural populations. Each neuron in the populations, however, does not spike independently: spike events are correlated from cell to…
We initiate a line of investigation into biological neural networks from an algorithmic perspective. We develop a simplified but biologically plausible model for distributed computation in stochastic spiking neural networks and study…
Humans and other animals are capable of improving their learning performance as they solve related tasks from a given problem domain, to the point of being able to learn from extremely limited data. While synaptic plasticity is generically…
Human learning relies on specialization -- distinct cognitive mechanisms working together to enable rapid learning. In contrast, most modern neural networks rely on a single mechanism: gradient descent over an objective function. This…
The field of artificial intelligence faces significant challenges in achieving both biological plausibility and computational efficiency, particularly in visual learning tasks. Current artificial neural networks, such as convolutional…
Neurons can display highly variable dynamics. While such variability presumably supports the wide range of behaviors generated by the organism, their gene expressions are relatively stable in the adult brain. This suggests that neuronal…
In this work we revisit the most fundamental building block in deep learning, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and study the limits of its performance on vision tasks. Empirical insights into MLPs are important for multiple reasons. (1)…
Working memory requires the brain to maintain information from the recent past to guide ongoing behavior. Neurons can contribute to this capacity by slowly integrating their inputs over time, creating persistent activity that outlasts the…
Recent experimental studies indicate that synaptic changes induced by neuronal activity are discrete jumps between a small number of stable states. Learning in systems with discrete synapses is known to be a computationally hard problem.…
Competitive dynamics are thought to occur in many processes of learning involving synaptic plasticity. Here we show, in a game theory-inspired model of synaptic interactions, that the competition between synapses in their weak and strong…