Related papers: Hebbian Plasticity for Improving Perceptual Decisi…
How can we build agents that keep learning from experience, quickly and efficiently, after their initial training? Here we take inspiration from the main mechanism of learning in biological brains: synaptic plasticity, carefully tuned by…
Many mathematical models of synaptic plasticity have been proposed to explain the diversity of plasticity phenomena observed in biological organisms. These models range from simple interpretations of Hebb's postulate, which suggests that…
How neuronal circuits achieve credit assignment remains a central unsolved question in systems neuroscience. Various studies have suggested plausible solutions for back-propagating error signals through multi-layer networks. These purely…
Theories and models of working memory (WM) were at least since the mid-1990s dominated by the persistent activity hypothesis. The past decade has seen rising concerns about the shortcomings of sustained activity as the mechanism for…
Much has been learned about plasticity of biological synapses from empirical studies. Hebbian plasticity is driven by correlated activity of presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons. Synapses that converge onto the same neuron often behave as…
We present a simulated biologically plausible language organ, made up of stylized but realistic neurons, synapses, brain areas, plasticity, and a simplified model of sensory perception. We show through experiments that this model succeeds…
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…
We introduce an unsupervised visual representation learning system based entirely on local plasticity rules, without labels, backpropagation, or global error signals. The model is a VisNet-inspired hierarchical architecture combining…
Understanding how the brain encodes visual information is a central challenge in neuroscience and machine learning. A promising approach is to reconstruct visual stimuli, essentially images, from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)…
Bayesian inference provides a principled framework for understanding brain function, while neural activity in the brain is inherently spike-based. This paper bridges these two perspectives by designing spiking neural networks that simulate…
Network systems can exhibit memory effects in which the interactions between different pairs of nodes adapt in time, leading to the emergence of preferred connections, patterns, and sub-networks. To a first approximation, this memory can be…
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…
Humans possess the capability to reason at an abstract level and to structure information into abstract categories, but the underlying neural processes have remained unknown. Experimental evidence has recently emerged for the organization…
It has been demonstrated that one of the most striking features of the nervous system, the so called 'plasticity' (i.e high adaptability at different structural levels) is primarily based on Hebbian learning which is a collection of…
Continual learning is the problem of sequentially learning new tasks or knowledge while protecting previously acquired knowledge. However, catastrophic forgetting poses a grand challenge for neural networks performing such learning process.…
Artificial neural networks can be used to solve a variety of robotic tasks. However, they risk failing catastrophically when faced with out-of-distribution (OOD) situations. Several approaches have employed a type of synaptic plasticity…
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are typically confined to accomplishing pre-defined tasks by learning a set of static parameters. In contrast, biological neural networks (BNNs) can adapt to various new tasks by continually updating the…
Cortical populations of neurons develop sparse representations adapted to the statistics of the environment. While existing synaptic plasticity models reproduce some of the observed receptive-field properties, a major obstacle is the…
Studying learning-related plasticity is central to understanding the acquisition of complex skills, for example learning to master a musical instrument. Over the past three decades, conventional group-based functional magnetic resonance…
Understanding how spontaneous brain activity relates to stimulus-driven neural responses is a fundamental challenge in cognitive neuroscience. While task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures localized stimulus-evoked…