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arXiv:1502.04156cs.LG

Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning

Yoshua Bengio, Dong-Hyun Lee, Jorg Bornschein, Thomas Mesnard, Zhouhan Lin

Abstract

Neuroscientists have long criticised deep learning algorithms as incompatible with current knowledge of neurobiology. We explore more biologically plausible versions of deep representation learning, focusing here mostly on unsupervised learning but developing a learning mechanism that could account for supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. The starting point is that the basic learning rule believed to govern synaptic weight updates (Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity) arises out of a simple update rule that makes a lot of sense from a machine learning point of view and can be interpreted as gradient descent on some objective function so long as the neuronal dynamics push firing rates towards better values of the objective function (be it supervised, unsupervised, or reward-driven). The second main idea is that this corresponds to a form of the variational EM algorithm, i.e., with approximate rather than exact posteriors, implemented by neural dynamics. Another contribution of this paper is that the gradients required for updating the hidden states in the above variational interpretation can be estimated using an approximation that only requires propagating activations forward and backward, with pairs of layers learning to form a denoising auto-encoder. Finally, we extend the theory about the probabilistic interpretation of auto-encoders to justify improved sampling schemes based on the generative interpretation of denoising auto-encoders, and we validate all these ideas on generative learning tasks.

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Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning

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Linked by 7 identifiable commenters in 7 comments across 6 threads, from Dec 2016 to Jan 2024. Found in 1 HN submission from Sep 2015 to Sep 2015. Open submission discussions.

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Discussed in comments6 threads

    • What do you mean, the development of the "Perception"? Do you mean the Perceptron? In that case, Backprop was invented way later than the Perceptron (see https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented-backpropagatio...). I don't see any information in your linked Wikipedia…

      kmmlngView on HNParent context

    • https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04156 > Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning > Neuroscientists have long criticised deep learning algorithms as incompatible with current knowledge of neurobiology. We explore more biologically plausible versions of deep representation…

      throwawaywegoView on HNParent context

  1. Why Robot Brains Need Symbols 1 comment
    • > We're not deep learning systems. So reasoning by analogy there isn't correct. That’s why I’m asking which definition you’re using. It’s broad enough that some models are biologically plausible even though there is criticism that many others are not…

      ben_wView on HNParent context

    • I might start with this paper from Bengio et al. and then read more recent papers which cite it. The problem hasn't been solved though so don't be surprised if you're not fully convinced by the arguments :) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04156.pdf

      iandanforthView on HNParent context

    • > Every time a major advance is made in AI the computational neuroscientist say: "why didn't you talk to us 15 years ago? We could have told you that!". I'm not sure which advances you are talking about, but the modern successes of Deep Learning are primarily due to…

      trottView on HNParent context

    • There is some work in this direction. See Bengio's Biologically Plausible Deep Learning (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04156.pdf) and its references for a starting point. So far, they don't achieve SOTA on anything.

      tlbView on HNParent context

    • (cont) I probably should have lead with this, but there's been a lot of interest in backprop-like algorithms in the brain * Geoff Hinton has a talk (and slide deck) about how back-propagation might be implemented in the brain. (Slide deck…

      mattkrauseView on HNParent context

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