1,152 research outputs found
A Neuron as a Signal Processing Device
A neuron is a basic physiological and computational unit of the brain. While
much is known about the physiological properties of a neuron, its computational
role is poorly understood. Here we propose to view a neuron as a signal
processing device that represents the incoming streaming data matrix as a
sparse vector of synaptic weights scaled by an outgoing sparse activity vector.
Formally, a neuron minimizes a cost function comprising a cumulative squared
representation error and regularization terms. We derive an online algorithm
that minimizes such cost function by alternating between the minimization with
respect to activity and with respect to synaptic weights. The steps of this
algorithm reproduce well-known physiological properties of a neuron, such as
weighted summation and leaky integration of synaptic inputs, as well as an
Oja-like, but parameter-free, synaptic learning rule. Our theoretical framework
makes several predictions, some of which can be verified by the existing data,
others require further experiments. Such framework should allow modeling the
function of neuronal circuits without necessarily measuring all the microscopic
biophysical parameters, as well as facilitate the design of neuromorphic
electronics.Comment: 2013 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, see
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=681029
Biologically plausible deep learning -- but how far can we go with shallow networks?
Training deep neural networks with the error backpropagation algorithm is
considered implausible from a biological perspective. Numerous recent
publications suggest elaborate models for biologically plausible variants of
deep learning, typically defining success as reaching around 98% test accuracy
on the MNIST data set. Here, we investigate how far we can go on digit (MNIST)
and object (CIFAR10) classification with biologically plausible, local learning
rules in a network with one hidden layer and a single readout layer. The hidden
layer weights are either fixed (random or random Gabor filters) or trained with
unsupervised methods (PCA, ICA or Sparse Coding) that can be implemented by
local learning rules. The readout layer is trained with a supervised, local
learning rule. We first implement these models with rate neurons. This
comparison reveals, first, that unsupervised learning does not lead to better
performance than fixed random projections or Gabor filters for large hidden
layers. Second, networks with localized receptive fields perform significantly
better than networks with all-to-all connectivity and can reach backpropagation
performance on MNIST. We then implement two of the networks - fixed, localized,
random & random Gabor filters in the hidden layer - with spiking leaky
integrate-and-fire neurons and spike timing dependent plasticity to train the
readout layer. These spiking models achieve > 98.2% test accuracy on MNIST,
which is close to the performance of rate networks with one hidden layer
trained with backpropagation. The performance of our shallow network models is
comparable to most current biologically plausible models of deep learning.
Furthermore, our results with a shallow spiking network provide an important
reference and suggest the use of datasets other than MNIST for testing the
performance of future models of biologically plausible deep learning.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure
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