Complexity without chaos: Plasticity within random recurrent networks generates robust timing and motor control

It is widely accepted that the complex dynamics characteristic of recurrent neural circuits contributes in a fundamental manner to brain function. Progress has been slow in understanding and exploiting the computational power of recurrent dynamics for two main reasons: nonlinear recurrent networks often exhibit chaotic behavior and most known learning rules do not work in robust fashion in recurrent networks. Here we address both these problems by demonstrating how random recurrent networks (RRN) that initially exhibit chaotic dynamics can be tuned through a supervised learning rule to generate locally stable neural patterns of activity that are both complex and robust to noise. The outcome is a novel neural network regime that exhibits both transiently stable and chaotic trajectories. We further show that the recurrent learning rule dramatically increases the ability of RRNs to generate complex spatiotemporal motor patterns, and accounts for recent experimental data showing a decrease in neural variability in response to stimulus onset

Analysis of attractor distances in Random Boolean Networks

We study the properties of the distance between attractors in Random Boolean Networks, a prominent model of genetic regulatory networks. We define three distance measures, upon which attractor distance matrices are constructed and their main statistic parameters are computed. The experimental analysis shows that ordered networks have a very clustered set of attractors, while chaotic networks' attractors are scattered; critical networks show, instead, a pattern with characteristics of both ordered and chaotic networks.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Presented at WIRN 2010 - Italian workshop on neural networks, May 2010. To appear in a volume published by IOS Pres

Chaos and Asymptotical Stability in Discrete-time Neural Networks

This paper aims to theoretically prove by applying Marotto's Theorem that both transiently chaotic neural networks (TCNN) and discrete-time recurrent neural networks (DRNN) have chaotic structure. A significant property of TCNN and DRNN is that they have only one fixed point, when absolute values of the self-feedback connection weights in TCNN and the difference time in DRNN are sufficiently large. We show that this unique fixed point can actually evolve into a snap-back repeller which generates chaotic structure, if several conditions are satisfied. On the other hand, by using the Lyapunov functions, we also derive sufficient conditions on asymptotical stability for symmetrical versions of both TCNN and DRNN, under which TCNN and DRNN asymptotically converge to a fixed point. Furthermore, generic bifurcations are also considered in this paper. Since both of TCNN and DRNN are not special but simple and general, the obtained theoretical results hold for a wide class of discrete-time neural networks. To demonstrate the theoretical results of this paper better, several numerical simulations are provided as illustrating examples.Comment: This paper will be published in Physica D. Figures should be requested to the first autho

Chaotic Iterations for Steganography - Stego-security and chaos-security

International audienceChaotic neural networks have received a great deal of attention these last years. In this paper we establish a precise correspondence between the so-called chaotic iterations and a particular class of artificial neural networks: global recurrent multi-layer perceptrons. We show formally that it is possible to make these iterations behave chaotically, as defined by Devaney, and thus we obtain the first neural networks proven chaotic. Several neural networks with different architectures are trained to exhibit a chaotical behavior