Related papers: Cycle is All You Need: More Is Different
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables reasoning in language models but requires explicit verbalization of intermediate steps. Looped transformers offer an alternative by iteratively refining representations within hidden states. This…
The spiking activity of the hippocampal place cells plays a key role in producing and sustaining an internalized representation of the ambient space---a cognitive map. These cells do not only exhibit location-specific spiking during…
It is often hypothesized that a crucial role for recurrent connections in the brain is to constrain the set of possible response patterns, thereby shaping the neural code. This implies the existence of neural codes that cannot arise solely…
Several guiding principles for thought processes are proposed and a neural-network-type model implementing these principles is presented and studied. We suggest to consider thinking within an associative network built-up of overlapping…
The ability to store continuous variables in the state of a biological system (e.g. a neural network) is critical for many behaviours. Most models for implementing such a memory manifold require hand-crafted symmetries in the interactions…
Self-organization is ubiquitous in nature and mind. However, machine learning and theories of cognition still barely touch the subject. The hurdle is that general patterns are difficult to define in terms of dynamical equations and…
The collective dynamics of neural populations are often characterized in terms of correlations in the spike activity of different neurons. Open questions surround the basic nature of these correlations. In particular, what leads to…
Shared Memory is a mechanism that allows several processes to communicate with each other by accessing -- writing or reading -- a set of variables that they have in common. A Consistency Model defines how each process observes the state of…
Working memory is responsible for the temporary manipulation and storage of information to support reasoning, learning and comprehension in the human brain. Background oscillations from subcortical structures may drive a gating or switching…
Associative memory systems enable content-addressable storage and retrieval of patterns, a capability central to biological neural computation and artificial intelligence. Classical implementations such as Hopfield networks face fundamental…
The topological framework of circuit topology has recently been introduced to complement knot theory and to help in understanding the physics of molecular folding. Naturally evolved linear molecular chains, such as proteins and nucleic…
Retrieval of episodic memory is a dynamical process in the large scale brain networks. In social groups, the neural patterns, associated to specific events directly experienced by single members, are encoded, recalled and shared by all…
Short-term memory in the brain cannot in general be explained the way long-term memory can -- as a gradual modification of synaptic weights -- since it takes place too quickly. Theories based on some form of cellular bistability, however,…
This work presents a comprehensive theory of consciousness grounded in mathematical formalism and supported by clinical data analysis. The framework developed herein demonstrates that consciousness exists as a continuous, non-monotonic…
Learning and interpreting the structure of the environment is an innate feature of biological systems, and is integral to guiding flexible behaviours for evolutionary viability. The concept of a cognitive map has emerged as one of the…
Continual learning involves learning from a stream of data without repetition of data points, a scenario that is inherently complex due to distributional shift across tasks. We propose a query-only attention mechanism that discards keys and…
Mammalian brains span about 4 orders of magnitude in cortical volume and have to operate in different environments that require diverse behavioral skills. Despite these geometric and behavioral diversities, the examination of cerebral…
The response time of physical computational elements is finite, and neurons are no exception. In hierarchical models of cortical networks each layer thus introduces a response lag. This inherent property of physical dynamical systems…
Coordinating multi-articulated bodies to generate purposeful movement is a formidable computational challenge. Yet the human motor system performs this task robustly in dynamic, uncertain environments, despite noisy and delayed feedback,…
Far-from-equilibrium systems can form memories of previous deformations or driving. In systems from sheared glassy materials to buckling beams to crumpled sheets, this behavior is dominated by return-point memory, in which revisiting a past…