Shogo Yonekura

Takeshi Kobayashi, Shogo Yonekura, Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Neuronal spikes directly drive muscles and endow animals with agile movements, but applying the spike-based control signals to actuators in artificial sensor-motor systems inevitably causes a collapse of learning. We developed a system that can vary \emph{the number of independent synaptic bundles} in sensor-to-motor connections. This paper demonstrates the following four findings: (i) Learning collapses once the number of motor neurons or the number of independent synaptic bundles exceeds a critical limit. (ii) The probability of learning failure is increased by a smaller number of motor neurons, while (iii) if learning succeeds, a smaller number of motor neurons leads to faster learning. (iv) The number of weight updates that move in the opposite direction of the optimal weight can quantitatively explain these results. The functions of spikes remain largely unknown. Identifying the parameter range in which learning systems using spikes can be constructed will make it possible to study the functions of spikes that were previously inaccessible due to the difficulty of learning.

Pengcheng Pan, Yonekura Shogo, Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Inspired by foveal vision, hard attention models promise interpretability and parameter economy. However, existing models like the Recurrent Model of Visual Attention (RAM) and Deep Recurrent Attention Model (DRAM) failed to model the hierarchy of human vision system, that compromise on the visual exploration dynamics. As a result, they tend to produce attention that are either overly fixational or excessively saccadic, diverging from human eye movement behavior. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Level Recurrent Attention Model (MRAM), a novel hard attention framework that explicitly models the neural hierarchy of human visual processing. By decoupling the function of glimpse location generation and task execution in two recurrent layers, MRAM emergent a balanced behavior between fixation and saccadic movement. Our results show that MRAM not only achieves more human-like attention dynamics, but also consistently outperforms CNN, RAM and DRAM baselines on standard image classification benchmarks.