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Conceptual and mathematical models of neurons have lagged behind empirical understanding for decades. Here we extend previous work in modeling biological systems with fully scale-independent quantum information-theoretic tools to develop a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-07-21 Chris Fields , James F. Glazebrook , Michael Levin

We show how brain networks, modeled as Spiking Neural Networks, can be viewed at different levels of abstraction. Lower levels include complications such as failures of neurons and edges. Higher levels are more abstract, making simplifying…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Nancy Lynch

Recent experiments in neuroscience reveal that task-relevant variables are often encoded in approximately orthogonal subspaces of neural population activity. These disentangled, or abstract, representations have been observed in multiple…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2026-03-16 Bin Wang , W. Jeffrey Johnston , Stefano Fusi

In machine learning, the use of an artificial neural network is the mainstream approach. Such a network consists of layers of neurons. These neurons are of the same type characterized by the two features: (1) an inner product of an input…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-04-28 Fenglei Fan , Wenxiang Cong , Ge Wang

Many activation functions have been proposed in the past, but selecting an adequate one requires trial and error. We propose a new methodology of designing activation functions within a neural network at each layer. We call this technique…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-28 Mark Harmon , Diego Klabjan

The firing dynamics of biological neurons in mathematical models is often determined by the model's parameters, representing the neurons' underlying properties. The parameter estimation problem seeks to recover those parameters of a single…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-10-05 Long Le , Yao Li

While feed-forward neurons in pre-trained language models (PLMs) can encode knowledge, past research targeted a small subset of neurons that heavily influence outputs. This leaves the broader role of neuron activations unclear, limiting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xin Zhao , Zehui Jiang , Naoki Yoshinaga

Neural networks are powerful tools for cognitive modeling due to their flexibility and emergent properties. However, interpreting their learned representations remains challenging due to their sub-symbolic semantics. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Andrew Nam , Declan Campbell , Thomas Griffiths , Jonathan Cohen , Sarah-Jane Leslie

The training process of neural networks usually optimize weights and bias parameters of linear transformations, while nonlinear activation functions are pre-specified and fixed. This work develops a systematic approach to constructing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zhengqi Liu , Shuhao Cao , Yuwen Li , Ludmil Zikatanov

Deep neural networks are highly expressive models that have recently achieved state of the art performance on speech and visual recognition tasks. While their expressiveness is the reason they succeed, it also causes them to learn…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2014-02-20 Christian Szegedy , Wojciech Zaremba , Ilya Sutskever , Joan Bruna , Dumitru Erhan , Ian Goodfellow , Rob Fergus

While spike timing has been shown to carry detailed stimulus information at the sensory periphery, its possible role in network computation is less clear. Most models of computation by neural networks are based on population firing rates.…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2015-07-17 Michael A. Schwemmer , Adrienne L. Fairhall , Sophie Denéve , Eric T. Shea-Brown

While many studies have shown that linguistic information is encoded in hidden word representations, few have studied individual neurons, to show how and in which neurons it is encoded. Among these, the common approach is to use an external…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Omer Antverg , Yonatan Belinkov

Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Armin Kekić , Jan Schneider , Dieter Büchler , Bernhard Schölkopf , Michel Besserve

One of the current key challenges in Explainable AI is in correctly interpreting activations of hidden neurons. It seems evident that accurate interpretations thereof would provide insights into the question what a deep learning system has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Abhilekha Dalal , Md Kamruzzaman Sarker , Adrita Barua , Pascal Hitzler

The internal functional behavior of trained Deep Neural Networks is notoriously difficult to interpret. Activation-maximization approaches are one set of techniques used to interpret and analyze trained deep-learning models. These consist…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Geraldin Nanfack , Alexander Fulleringer , Jonathan Marty , Michael Eickenberg , Eugene Belilovsky

While deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance, they tend to lack transparency in prediction. The pursuit of greater interpretability in neural networks often results in a degradation of their original performance. Some…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Hefeng Wu , Hao Jiang , Keze Wang , Ziyi Tang , Xianghuan He , Liang Lin

Foundation models are powerful yet often opaque in their decision-making. A topic of continued interest in both neuroscience and artificial intelligence is whether some neurons behave like grandmother cells, i.e., neurons that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Ricardo Knauer , Erik Rodner

We present a toolkit to facilitate the interpretation and understanding of neural network models. The toolkit provides several methods to identify salient neurons with respect to the model itself or an external task. A user can visualize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Fahim Dalvi , Avery Nortonsmith , D. Anthony Bau , Yonatan Belinkov , Hassan Sajjad , Nadir Durrani , James Glass

Computational modeling plays an increasingly important role in neuroscience, highlighting the philosophical question of how computational models explain. In the context of neural network models for neuroscience, concerns have been raised…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2021-04-15 Rosa Cao , Daniel Yamins

The neural networks have trained on incomplete sets that a doctor could collect. Trained neural networks have correctly classified all the presented instances. The number of intervals entered for encoding the quantitative variables is equal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Vitaly Schetinin , Anatoly Brazhnikov