Related papers: The Architecture of a Biologically Plausible Langu…
Despite tremendous progress in neuroscience, we do not have a compelling narrative for the precise way whereby the spiking of neurons in our brain results in high-level cognitive phenomena such as planning and language. We introduce a…
A major target of linguistics and cognitive science has been to understand what class of learning systems can acquire the key structures of natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue…
Learning in the brain is local and unsupervised (Hebbian). We derive the foundations of an effective human language model inspired by these microscopic constraints. It has two parts: (1) a hierarchy of neurons which learns to tokenize words…
This review explores biologically inspired learning as a model for intelligent robot control and sensing technology on the basis of specific examples. Hebbian synaptic learning is discussed as a functionally relevant model for machine…
We describe a parser of English effectuated by biologically plausible neurons and synapses, and implemented through the Assembly Calculus, a recently proposed computational framework for cognitive function. We demonstrate that this device…
There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three…
Learning to understand speech appears almost effortless for typically developing infants, yet from an information-processing perspective, acquiring a language from acoustic speech is an enormous challenge. This chapter reviews recent…
Infants, adults, non-human primates and non-primates all learn patterns implicitly, and they do so across modalities. The biological evidence supports the hypothesis that the mechanism for this learning is general but computationally local.…
Earlier research has suggested that human infants might use statistical dependencies between speech and non-linguistic multimodal input to bootstrap their language learning before they know how to segment words from running speech. However,…
Humans can learn languages from remarkably little experience. Developing computational models that explain this ability has been a major challenge in cognitive science. Bayesian models that build in strong inductive biases - factors that…
Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through…
For the complex human brain that enables us to communicate in natural language, we gathered good understandings of principles underlying language acquisition and processing, knowledge about socio-cultural conditions, and insights about…
Infants gradually learn to parse continuous speech into words and connect names with objects, yet the mechanisms behind development of early word perception skills remain unknown. We studied the extent to which early words can be acquired…
A few million words suffice for children to acquire language. Yet, the brain mechanisms underlying this unique ability remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we investigate neural activity recorded from over 7,400 electrodes…
Lateral inhibition models coupled with Hebbian plasticity have been shown to learn factorised causal representations of input stimuli, for instance, oriented edges are learned from natural images. Currently, these models require the…
Hebbian plasticity is a powerful principle that allows biological brains to learn from their lifetime experience. By contrast, artificial neural networks trained with backpropagation generally have fixed connection weights that do not…
A fundamental aspect of learning in biological neural networks is the plasticity property which allows them to modify their configurations during their lifetime. Hebbian learning is a biologically plausible mechanism for modeling the…
A learning algorithm for multilayer neural networks based on biologically plausible mechanisms is studied. Motivated by findings in experimental neurobiology, we consider synaptic averaging in the induction of plasticity changes, which…
Backpropagation is a cornerstone algorithm in training neural networks for supervised learning, which uses a gradient descent method to update network weights by minimizing the discrepancy between actual and desired outputs. Despite its…
In this paper we explore a neural control architecture that is both biologically plausible, and capable of fully autonomous learning. It consists of feedback controllers that learn to achieve a desired state by selecting the errors that…