用低维指令控制神经解码,实现小数据高效建模。
The Von-Neumann State-Space Transformer for neural decoding
- 以低秩指令库替代传统Transformer的统一运算,每条令牌由状态记忆生成专属算子。
- 在三个运动皮层解码任务中,仅需少量数据即显著优于标准Transformer,且上下文越长准确率越高。
- 适合资源受限场景下的神经信号解码,也适用于小规模文本建模任务。
皮层计算具有显著的低维特性:少数潜在变量通过神经元群体活动驱动更高维度的单个神经元响应。本文目标是提升模型在有限数据和小参数量下的解码效率。传统Transformer中前馈层对每个令牌应用相同算子,我们提出受冯·诺伊曼架构启发的高效计算假设:控制器解码指令后执行特定算子;而常规软专家混合仅融合输出,不融合算子。为此提出冯·诺伊曼状态空间Transformer(VN-SST),其前馈块为低秩指令库:共享基础算子加一组可学习的低秩指令,每令牌通过状态空间记忆的低维投影生成唯一权重矩阵。该低维轨迹充当指令指针,模拟皮层计算的低维动态调控机制。在三个运动皮层神经解码基准上,VN-SST远超现代Transformer,在数据最稀缺任务中大幅领先,其余两项任务也表现最优,且随着上下文增长准确率上升而非下降。评估显示,网络将大型指令库压缩至每令牌数比特,程序容量作为控制通道而非精度杠杆。同一模型在两个小型文本基准上亦更参数高效,表明该机制具备通用性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Cortical computation is strikingly low-dimensional: a handful of latent variables, carried in a neural population's activity, steer the higher-dimensional responses of individual neurons. Our aim is sample efficiency-models that decode well from limited data and at small parameter budgets. In a standard Transformer layer, the feed-forward block applies the same operator to every token. We suggest a von-Neumann inspired hypothesis of efficient computation as an alternative for neural decoding: a controller decodes an instruction and then executes a token-specific operator; the usual realization-a soft mixture of experts-only blends their outputs, not operators. We introduce a von-Neumann State-Space Transformer (VN-SST), a memory-augmented Transformer whose feed-forward block is a low-rank instruction bank: a shared base operator plus a small set of learned low-rank instructions, from which a per-token code synthesizes the weight matrix actually used at that token. The code is read from a low- dimensional projection of a carried state-space memory, so a slow latent trajectory acts as an instruction pointer-mirroring how low-dimensional dynamics may route cortical computation. On three motor-cortex neural-decoding benchmarks, VN-SST is far more data-efficient than a modern Transformer, each jointly predicting spikes and decoding behavior. This model wins by a wide margin on the scarcest benchmark, leads on the other two, and turns longer context into rising rather than falling accuracy. We evaluated that the network compresses a large instruction bank to a few bits per token, so program capacity acts as a control channel, not an accuracy lever. The same model is also more parameter-efficient on two small text benchmarks used for language modeling (LLMs), suggesting a generic mechanism.
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