Related papers: Abrupt and spontaneous strategy switches emerge in…

Regardless of the marked differences between biological and artificial neural systems, one fundamental similarity is that they are essentially dynamical systems that can learn to imitate other dynamical systems, without knowing their…

Biological neural networks are capable of recruiting different sets of neurons to encode different memories. However, when training artificial neural networks on a set of tasks, typically, no mechanism is employed for selectively producing…

Introduction: In contrast to current AI technology, natural intelligence -- the kind of autonomous intelligence that is realized in the brains of animals and humans to attain in their natural environment goals defined by a repertoire of…

Abrupt learning is a common phenomenon in recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on working memory tasks. In such cases, the networks develop transient slow regions in state space that extend the effective timescales of computation.…

Neural networks have long been used to model human intelligence, capturing elements of behavior and cognition, and their neural basis. Recent advancements in deep learning have enabled neural network models to reach and even surpass human…

Human cognition is punctuated by abrupt, spontaneous shifts between topics-driven by emotional, contextual, or associative cues-a phenomenon known as spontaneous thought in neuroscience. In contrast, self-attention based models depend on…

The human reasoning process is seldom a one-way process from an input leading to an output. Instead, it often involves a systematic deduction by ruling out other possible outcomes as a self-checking mechanism. In this paper, we describe the…

Behavioral changes in animals and humans, as a consequence of an error or a verbal instruction, can be extremely rapid. Improvement in behavioral performances are usually associated in machine learning and reinforcement learning to synaptic…

In recent years, neural networks have demonstrated an outstanding ability to achieve complex learning tasks across various domains. However, they suffer from the "catastrophic forgetting" problem when they face a sequence of learning tasks,…

Humans can learn several tasks in succession with minimal mutual interference but perform more poorly when trained on multiple tasks at once. The opposite is true for standard deep neural networks. Here, we propose novel computational…

It is important to understand how dropout, a popular regularization method, aids in achieving a good generalization solution during neural network training. In this work, we present a theoretical derivation of an implicit regularization of…

Uniquely among primates, humans possess a remarkable capacity to recognize and manipulate abstract structure in the service of task goals across a broad range of behaviors. One illustration of this is in the visual perception of geometric…

Animals rely on different decision strategies when faced with ambiguous or uncertain cues. Depending on the context, decisions may be biased towards events that were most frequently experienced in the past, or be more explorative. A…

Models based on the Transformer neural network architecture have seen success on a wide variety of tasks that appear to require complex "cognitive branching" -- or the ability to maintain pursuit of one goal while accomplishing others. In…

Selective attention allows to process stimuli which are behaviorally relevant, while attenuating distracting information. However, it is an open question what mechanisms implement selective routing, and how they are engaged in dependence on…

Do reasoning models have "Aha!" moments? Prior work suggests that models like DeepSeek-R1-Zero undergo sudden mid-trace realizations that lead to accurate outputs, implying an intrinsic capacity for self-correction. Yet, it remains unclear…

Traditionally, cognitive and computer scientists have viewed intelligence solipsistically, as a property of unitary agents devoid of social context. Given the success of contemporary learning algorithms, we argue that the bottleneck in…

The human brain is the gold standard of adaptive learning. It not only can learn and benefit from experience, but also can adapt to new situations. In contrast, deep neural networks only learn one sophisticated but fixed mapping from inputs…

Learning in artificial neural networks usually relies on continuous, externally driven weight updates, in which parameters are modified at every step in response to incoming data, error signals or reward feedback. In this setting, routine…

The process of training an artificial neural network involves iteratively adapting its parameters so as to minimize the error of the network's prediction, when confronted with a learning task. This iterative change can be naturally…