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Theory

PBWM Unit

Towards Biologically Inspired Executive Control

Executive Control is core to what most people recognise as true intelligence. For example, the ability to attend to relevant cues and maintain task dependent information whilst ignoring distracting details and taking appropriate actions.  Working Memory (WM) is a core component of Executive Control. “Working memory is a short-term repository… Read More »Towards Biologically Inspired Executive Control

Hippocampus

AHA! an ‘Artificial Hippocampal Algorithm’ for Episodic Machine Learning

We’re very happy to report that we recently published a preprint on AHA, an ‘Artificial Hippocampal Algorithm’ for Episodic Machine Learning. It’s the culmination of a multi-year research project and is a starting point for the next wave of developments. This article describes the motivation for developing AHA and a… Read More »AHA! an ‘Artificial Hippocampal Algorithm’ for Episodic Machine Learning

Memory

Hippocampus and the Episodic confusion (for machine learning)

The standard definitions of Episodic and Semantic Memory hide some important subtleties that impact the development of Machine Learning algorithms for AI (particularly those building Episodic Learning capability). This article explores this issue and provides a context for upcoming articles work to take us a step closer to ‘animal-like’ machine learning

Biologically-plausible learning rules for artificial neural networks

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) – are conceptually simple; the combination of inputs and weights in a classical ANN can be represented as a single matrix product operation followed by an elementwise nonlinearity. However, as the number of learned parameters increases, it becomes very difficult to train these networks effectively. Most… Read More »Biologically-plausible learning rules for artificial neural networks

Cerebral networks for conscious access and decision making

Originally published in March 2019 in an electronic journal in Japanese Introduction The purpose of this essay is to survey the relationship between decision making and large-scale cerebral networks with regard to conscious access, a purported neural correlate of consciousness, and to provide clues for computational modelling and general understanding… Read More »Cerebral networks for conscious access and decision making

Understanding Equivariance

We are exploring the nature of equivariance, a concept that is now closely associated with the capsules network architecture (see key papers Sabour et al, and Hinton et al). Machine learning representations that capture equivariance must learn the way that patterns in the input vary together, in addition to statistical clusters in… Read More »Understanding Equivariance

New approaches to Deep Networks – Capsules (Hinton), HTM (Numenta), Sparsey (Neurithmic Systems) and RCN (Vicarious)

  Reproduced left to right from [8,10,1] Within a 5 day span in October, 4 papers came out that take a significantly different approach to AI hierarchical networks. They are all inspired by biological principles to varying degrees. It’s exciting to see different ways of thinking. Particularly at a time… Read More »New approaches to Deep Networks – Capsules (Hinton), HTM (Numenta), Sparsey (Neurithmic Systems) and RCN (Vicarious)