用神经活动波模拟空间信息整合,提升模型全局感知能力。
Traveling Waves Integrate Spatial Information Through Time
- 设计卷积循环网络生成响应视觉的行波激活
- 行波扩展局部神经元感受野,实现长程信息编码
- 在语义分割任务中性能超越局部网络,参数更少
神经活动的行波广泛存在于大脑中,但其计算功能尚不明确。一种主流假说是它们能跨神经群体传递和整合空间信息。然而,极少有计算模型探索如何利用行波进行这种整合处理。受著名问题‘能否听出鼓的形状?’启发——该问题揭示了波动模式如何编码几何信息——我们研究人工神经网络是否可借鉴类似原理。具体而言,我们引入卷积循环神经网络,使其隐藏状态在视觉刺激下学习产生行波,从而实现空间信息整合。将这些波状激活序列作为视觉表征,构建出强大的表示空间,在需要全局空间上下文的任务中表现优于局部前馈网络。特别地,行波有效扩展了局部连接神经元的感受野,支持长距离信息编码与通信。实验表明,具备此机制的模型在需全局整合的视觉语义分割任务中显著优于局部前馈模型,并以更少参数媲美非局部U-Net模型。本工作为基于行波的人工网络通信与视觉表征迈出第一步,提示波动力学可能带来效率与训练稳定性优势,同时为连接模型与生物神经记录提供新框架。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Traveling waves of neural activity are widely observed in the brain, but their precise computational function remains unclear. One prominent hypothesis is that they enable the transfer and integration of spatial information across neural populations. However, few computational models have explored how traveling waves might be harnessed to perform such integrative processing. Drawing inspiration from the famous "Can one hear the shape of a drum?" problem -- which highlights how normal modes of wave dynamics encode geometric information -- we investigate whether similar principles can be leveraged in artificial neural networks. Specifically, we introduce convolutional recurrent neural networks that learn to produce traveling waves in their hidden states in response to visual stimuli, enabling spatial integration. By then treating these wave-like activation sequences as visual representations themselves, we obtain a powerful representational space that outperforms local feed-forward networks on tasks requiring global spatial context. In particular, we observe that traveling waves effectively expand the receptive field of locally connected neurons, supporting long-range encoding and communication of information. We demonstrate that models equipped with this mechanism solve visual semantic segmentation tasks demanding global integration, significantly outperforming local feed-forward models and rivaling non-local U-Net models with fewer parameters. As a first step toward traveling-wave-based communication and visual representation in artificial networks, our findings suggest wave-dynamics may provide efficiency and training stability benefits, while simultaneously offering a new framework for connecting models to biological recordings of neural activity.
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