Although the currently popular deep learning networks achieve unprecedented performance on some tasks, the human brain still has a monopoly on general intelligence. Motivated by this and biological implausibility of deep learning networks, we developed a family of biologically plausible artificial neural networks (NNs) for unsupervised learning. Our approach is based on optimizing principled objective functions containing a term that matches the pairwise similarity of outputs to the similarity of inputs, hence the name - similarity-based. Gradient-based online optimization of such similarity-based objective functions can be implemented by NNs with biologically plausible local learning rules. Similarity-based cost functions and associated NNs solve unsupervised learning tasks such as linear dimensionality reduction, sparse and/or nonnegative feature extraction, blind nonnegative source separation, clustering and manifold learning.
Columbia University Irving Medical Center（哥伦比亚大学欧文医学中心）
Inspired by the adaptation phenomenon of neuronal firing, we propose the regularity normalization (RN) as an unsupervised attention mechanism (UAM) which computes the statistical regularity in the implicit space of neural networks under the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. Treating the neural network optimization process as a partially observable model selection problem, the regularity normalization constrains the implicit space by a normalization factor, the universal code length. We compute this universal code incrementally across neural network layers and demonstrate the flexibil…
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour（唐德斯脑、认知与行为研究所）；Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）
Unlike robots, humans learn, adapt and perceive their bodies by interacting with the world. Discovering how the brain represents the body and generates actions is of major importance for robotics and artificial intelligence. Here we discuss how neuroscience findings open up opportunities to improve current estimation and control algorithms in robotics. In particular, how active inference, a mathematical formulation of how the brain resists a natural tendency to disorder, provides a unified recipe to potentially solve some of the major challenges in robotics, such as adaptation, robustness, fle…
University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Jahangirnagar University（贾汉吉尔纳加尔大学）；American International University - Bangladesh（孟加拉美国国际大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；Anglia Ruskin University（安格利亚鲁斯金大学）；Saitama University（埼玉大学）；University of Stirling（斯特灵大学）
Rapid popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing permits neuroscientists to collect multilevel and multichannel brain data to better understand brain functions, diagnose diseases, and devise treatments. To ensure secure and reliable data communication between end-to-end (E2E) devices supported by current IoT and cloud infrastructure, trust management is needed at the IoT and user ends. This paper introduces a Neuro-Fuzzy based Brain-inspired trust management model (TMM) to secure IoT devices and relay nodes, and to ensure data reliability. The proposed TMM utilizes node behavio…
Mode-conditioned music learning and composition: a spiking neural network inspired by neuroscience and psychology
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院脑认知与类脑智能技术重点实验室）
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
How neural networks in the human brain represent commonsense knowledge, and complete related reasoning tasks is an important research topic in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Although the traditional artificial neural network using fixed-length vectors to represent symbols has gained good performance in some specific tasks, it is still a black box that lacks interpretability, far from how humans perceive the world. Inspired by the grandmother-cell hypothesis in neuroscience, this work investigates how population encoding and spiking timing-dependent pl…
Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；AI Research Lab（AI研究实验室）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Rochester, New York, USA（纽约罗切斯特市）；Los Angeles, California, USA（加州洛杉矶市）；Seattle, Washington, USA（华盛顿州西雅图市）
Interpreting computations in the visual cortex as learning and inference in a generative model of the environment has received wide support both in neuroscience and cognitive science. However, hierarchical computations, a hallmark of visual cortical processing, has remained impervious for generative models because of a lack of adequate tools to address it. Here we capitalize on advances in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to investigate the early visual cortex with sparse coding hierarchical VAEs trained on natural images. We design alternative architectures that vary both in terms of the gener…
BITS Pilani K K Birla Goa Campus（Birla技术与科学学院皮拉尼分校KK Birla果阿校区）；New York University（纽约大学）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Reinforcement learning methods have recently been very successful at performing complex sequential tasks like playing Atari games, Go and Poker. These algorithms have outperformed humans in several tasks by learning from scratch, using only scalar rewards obtained through interaction with their environment. While there certainly has been considerable independent innovation to produce such results, many core ideas in reinforcement learning are inspired by phenomena in animal learning, psychology and neuroscience. In this paper, we comprehensively review a large number of findings in both neuros…
Nature's Insight: A Novel Framework and Comprehensive Analysis of Agentic Reasoning Through the Lens of Neuroscience
School of EEE, Nanyang Technological University (NTU)（南洋理工大学电子工程系）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学网络科学与技术学院）；School of Integrated Circuits and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学集成电路与电子学院）；School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学社会科学学院）；Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento（特伦托大学信息工程与计算机科学系）；Division of Computational Science and Technology, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（皇家理工学院计算科学与技术系）；Bioscience and Biomedical Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology（香港科技大学生物科学与生物医学工程系）
We propose that the Continual Learning desiderata can be achieved through a neuro-inspired architecture, grounded on Mountcastle's cortical column hypothesis. The proposed architecture involves a single module, called Self-Taught Associative Memory (STAM), which models the function of a cortical column. STAMs are repeated in multi-level hierarchies involving feedforward, lateral and feedback connections. STAM networks learn in an unsupervised manner, based on a combination of online clustering and hierarchical predictive coding. This short paper only presents the architecture and its connectio…
Cortical plasticity is one of the main features that enable our ability to learn and adapt in our environment. Indeed, the cerebral cortex self-organizes itself through structural and synaptic plasticity mechanisms that are very likely at the basis of an extremely interesting characteristic of the human brain development: the multimodal association. In spite of the diversity of the sensory modalities, like sight, sound and touch, the brain arrives at the same concepts (convergence). Moreover, biological observations show that one modality can activate the internal representation of another mod…
Sparse coding networks, which utilize unsupervised learning to maximize coding efficiency, have successfully reproduced response properties found in primary visual cortex \cite{AN:OlshausenField96}. However, conventional sparse coding models require that the coding circuit can fully sample the sensory data in a one-to-one fashion, a requirement not supported by experimental data from the thalamo-cortical projection. To relieve these strict wiring requirements, we propose a sparse coding network constructed by introducing synaptic learning in the framework of compressed sensing. We demonstrate …
Automated discovery of early visual concepts from raw image data is a major open challenge in AI research. Addressing this problem, we propose an unsupervised approach for learning disentangled representations of the underlying factors of variation. We draw inspiration from neuroscience, and show how this can be achieved in an unsupervised generative model by applying the same learning pressures as have been suggested to act in the ventral visual stream in the brain. By enforcing redundancy reduction, encouraging statistical independence, and exposure to data with transform continuities analog…
The plasticity of the conduction delay between neurons plays a fundamental role in learning. However, the exact underlying mechanisms in the brain for this modulation is still an open problem. Understanding the precise adjustment of synaptic delays could help us in developing effective brain-inspired computational models in providing aligned insights with the experimental evidence. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised biologically plausible learning rule for adjusting the synaptic delays in spiking neural networks. Then, we provided some mathematical proofs to show that our learning rule …
Stacked unsupervised learning (SUL) seems more biologically plausible than backpropagation, because learning is local to each layer. But SUL has fallen far short of backpropagation in practical applications, undermining the idea that SUL can explain how brains learn. Here we show an SUL algorithm that can perform completely unsupervised clustering of MNIST digits with comparable accuracy relative to unsupervised algorithms based on backpropagation. Our algorithm is exceeded only by self-supervised methods requiring training data augmentation by geometric distortions. The only prior knowledge i…
Spiking Neural Network (SNN), as a brain-inspired approach, is attracting attention due to its potential to produce ultra-high-energy-efficient hardware. Competitive learning based on Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) is a popular method to train an unsupervised SNN. However, previous unsupervised SNNs trained through this method are limited to a shallow network with only one learnable layer and cannot achieve satisfactory results when compared with multi-layer SNNs. In this paper, we eased this limitation by: 1)We proposed a Spiking Inception (Sp-Inception) module, inspired by the Ince…
Justus-Liebig University Giessen（吉森尤斯利比希大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Neural network models can now recognise images, understand text, translate languages, and play many human games at human or superhuman levels. These systems are highly abstracted, but are inspired by biological brains and use only biologically plausible computations. In the coming years, neural networks are likely to become less reliant on learning from massive labelled datasets, and more robust and generalisable in their task performance. From their successes and failures, we can learn about the computational requirements of the different tasks at which brains excel. Deep learning also provid…
The fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience have a long history of fertile bi-directional interactions. On the one hand, important inspiration for the development of artificial intelligence systems has come from the study of natural systems of intelligence, the mammalian neocortex in particular. On the other, important inspiration for models and theories of the brain have emerged from artificial intelligence research. A central question at the intersection of these two areas is concerned with the processes by which neocortex learns, and the extent to which they are analogous to the …
While great strides have been made in using deep learning algorithms to solve supervised learning tasks, the problem of unsupervised learning - leveraging unlabeled examples to learn about the structure of a domain - remains a difficult unsolved challenge. Here, we explore prediction of future frames in a video sequence as an unsupervised learning rule for learning about the structure of the visual world. We describe a predictive neural network ("PredNet") architecture that is inspired by the concept of "predictive coding" from the neuroscience literature. These networks learn to predict futur…
University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Sorbonne Universités（索邦大学）；UPMC Univ Paris 06（巴黎第六大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）
Retinal image of surrounding objects varies tremendously due to the changes in position, size, pose, illumination condition, background context, occlusion, noise, and nonrigid deformations. But despite these huge variations, our visual system is able to invariantly recognize any object in just a fraction of a second. To date, various computational models have been proposed to mimic the hierarchical processing of the ventral visual pathway, with limited success. Here, we show that the association of both biologically inspired network architecture and learning rule significantly improves the mod…
UC San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
The fruit fly Drosophila's olfactory circuit has inspired a new locality sensitive hashing (LSH) algorithm, FlyHash. In contrast with classical LSH algorithms that produce low dimensional hash codes, FlyHash produces sparse high-dimensional hash codes and has also been shown to have superior empirical performance compared to classical LSH algorithms in similarity search. However, FlyHash uses random projections and cannot learn from data. Building on inspiration from FlyHash and the ubiquity of sparse expansive representations in neurobiology, our work proposes a novel hashing algorithm BioHas…
Although deep RL models have shown a great potential for solving various types of tasks with minimal supervision, several key challenges remain in terms of learning from limited experience, adapting to environmental changes, and generalizing learning from a single task. Recent evidence in decision neuroscience has shown that the human brain has an innate capacity to resolve these issues, leading to optimism regarding the development of neuroscience-inspired solutions toward sample-efficient, and generalizable RL algorithms. We show that the computational model combining model-based and model-f…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Two main routes of learning methods exist at present including error-driven global learning and neuroscience-oriented local learning. Integrating them into one network may provide complementary learning capabilities for versatile learning scenarios. At the same time, neuromorphic computing holds great promise, but still needs plenty of useful algorithms and algorithm-hardware co-designs for exploiting the advantages. Here, we report a neuromorphic hybrid learning model by introducing a brain-inspired meta-learning paradigm and a differentiable spiking model incorporating neuronal dynamics and …
There is increasing realization in neuroscience that information is represented in the brain, e.g., neocortex, hippocampus, in the form sparse distributed codes (SDCs), a kind of cell assembly. Two essential questions are: a) how are such codes formed on the basis of single trials, and how is similarity preserved during learning, i.e., how do more similar inputs get mapped to more similar SDCs. I describe a novel Modular Sparse Distributed Code (MSDC) that provides simple, neurally plausible answers to both questions. An MSDC coding field (CF) consists of Q WTA competitive modules (CMs), each …
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit（盖茨比计算神经科学中心）；Sainsbury Wellcome Centre（塞恩斯伯里惠康中心）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；DeepMind（深度思维）
Artificial neural systems trained using reinforcement, supervised, and unsupervised learning all acquire internal representations of high dimensional input. To what extent these representations depend on the different learning objectives is largely unknown. Here we compare the representations learned by eight different convolutional neural networks, each with identical ResNet architectures and trained on the same family of egocentric images, but embedded within different learning systems. Specifically, the representations are trained to guide action in a compound reinforcement learning task; t…
Attempting to imitate the brain functionalities, researchers have bridged between neuroscience and artificial intelligence for decades; however, experimental neuroscience has not directly advanced the field of machine learning. Here, using neuronal cultures, we demonstrate that increased training frequency accelerates the neuronal adaptation processes. This mechanism was implemented on artificial neural networks, where a local learning step-size increases for coherent consecutive learning steps and tested on a simple dataset of handwritten digits, MNIST. Based on our online learning results wi…
CerCo CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心大脑与认知研究中心）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；IRIT CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心图卢兹计算机科学研究所）；ANITI（图卢兹人工智能跨学科研究所）
Deep neural networks excel at image classification, but their performance is far less robust to input perturbations than human perception. In this work we explore whether this shortcoming may be partly addressed by incorporating brain-inspired recurrent dynamics in deep convolutional networks. We take inspiration from a popular framework in neuroscience: 'predictive coding'. At each layer of the hierarchical model, generative feedback 'predicts' (i.e., reconstructs) the pattern of activity in the previous layer. The reconstruction errors are used to iteratively update the network's representat…
