10,536 research outputs found
How Does the Cerebral Cortex Work? Developement, Learning, Attention, and 3D Vision by Laminar Circuits of Visual Cortex
A key goal of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience is to link brain mechanisms to behavioral functions. The present article describes recent progress towards explaining how the visual cortex sees. Visual cortex, like many parts of perceptual and cognitive neocortex, is organized into six main layers of cells, as well as characteristic sub-lamina. Here it is proposed how these layered circuits help to realize the processes of developement, learning, perceptual grouping, attention, and 3D vision through a combination of bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down interactions. A key theme is that the mechanisms which enable developement and learning to occur in a stable way imply properties of adult behavior. These results thus begin to unify three fields: infant cortical developement, adult cortical neurophysiology and anatomy, and adult visual perception. The identified cortical mechanisms promise to generalize to explain how other perceptual and cognitive processes work.Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-01-1-0397); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624
Neural 3D Mesh Renderer
For modeling the 3D world behind 2D images, which 3D representation is most
appropriate? A polygon mesh is a promising candidate for its compactness and
geometric properties. However, it is not straightforward to model a polygon
mesh from 2D images using neural networks because the conversion from a mesh to
an image, or rendering, involves a discrete operation called rasterization,
which prevents back-propagation. Therefore, in this work, we propose an
approximate gradient for rasterization that enables the integration of
rendering into neural networks. Using this renderer, we perform single-image 3D
mesh reconstruction with silhouette image supervision and our system
outperforms the existing voxel-based approach. Additionally, we perform
gradient-based 3D mesh editing operations, such as 2D-to-3D style transfer and
3D DeepDream, with 2D supervision for the first time. These applications
demonstrate the potential of the integration of a mesh renderer into neural
networks and the effectiveness of our proposed renderer
Efficient collective swimming by harnessing vortices through deep reinforcement learning
Fish in schooling formations navigate complex flow-fields replete with
mechanical energy in the vortex wakes of their companions. Their schooling
behaviour has been associated with evolutionary advantages including collective
energy savings. How fish harvest energy from their complex fluid environment
and the underlying physical mechanisms governing energy-extraction during
collective swimming, is still unknown. Here we show that fish can improve their
sustained propulsive efficiency by actively following, and judiciously
intercepting, vortices in the wake of other swimmers. This swimming strategy
leads to collective energy-savings and is revealed through the first ever
combination of deep reinforcement learning with high-fidelity flow simulations.
We find that a `smart-swimmer' can adapt its position and body deformation to
synchronise with the momentum of the oncoming vortices, improving its average
swimming-efficiency at no cost to the leader. The results show that fish may
harvest energy deposited in vortices produced by their peers, and support the
conjecture that swimming in formation is energetically advantageous. Moreover,
this study demonstrates that deep reinforcement learning can produce navigation
algorithms for complex flow-fields, with promising implications for energy
savings in autonomous robotic swarms.Comment: 26 pages, 14 figure
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