Mario Franco

Khubaib Ahmed, Ahsan Adeel, Mario Franco et al.

Deep learning (DL) has big-data processing capabilities that are as good, or even better, than those of humans in many real-world domains, but at the cost of high energy requirements that may be unsustainable in some applications and of errors, that, though infrequent, can be large. We hypothesise that a fundamental weakness of DL lies in its intrinsic dependence on integrate-and-fire point neurons that maximise information transmission irrespective of whether it is relevant in the current context or not. This leads to unnecessary neural firing and to the feedforward transmission of conflicting messages, which makes learning difficult and processing energy inefficient. Here we show how to circumvent these limitations by mimicking the capabilities of context-sensitive neocortical neurons that receive input from diverse sources as a context to amplify and attenuate the transmission of relevant and irrelevant information, respectively. We demonstrate that a deep network composed of such local processors seeks to maximise agreement between the active neurons, thus restricting the transmission of conflicting information to higher levels and reducing the neural activity required to process large amounts of heterogeneous real-world data. As shown to be far more effective and efficient than current forms of DL, this two-point neuron study offers a possible step-change in transforming the cellular foundations of deep network architectures.

Mario Franco, Carlos Gershenson

Nowadays, neural networks act as a synonym for artificial intelligence. Present neural network models, although remarkably powerful, are inefficient both in terms of data and energy. Several alternative forms of neural networks have been proposed to address some of these problems. Specifically, spiking neural networks are suitable for efficient hardware implementations. However, effective learning algorithms for spiking networks remain elusive, although it is suspected that effective plasticity mechanisms could alleviate the problem of data efficiency. Here, we present a new framework for spiking neural networks - Spark - built upon the idea of modular design, from simple components to entire models. The aim of this framework is to provide an efficient and streamlined pipeline for spiking neural networks. We showcase this framework by solving the sparse-reward cartpole problem with simple plasticity mechanisms. We hope that a framework compatible with traditional ML pipelines may accelerate research in the area, specifically for continuous and unbatched learning, akin to the one animals exhibit.

Mario Franco, Gerardo Febres, Nelson Fernández et al.

Classification is a ubiquitous and fundamental problem in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with extensive efforts dedicated to developing more powerful classifiers and larger datasets. However, the classification task is ultimately constrained by the intrinsic properties of datasets, independently of computational power or model complexity. In this work, we introduce a formal entropy-based measure of classificability, which quantifies the inherent difficulty of a classification problem by assessing the uncertainty in class assignments given feature representations. This measure captures the degree of class overlap and aligns with human intuition, serving as an upper bound on classification performance for classification problems. Our results establish a theoretical limit beyond which no classifier can improve the classification accuracy, regardless of the architecture or amount of data, in a given problem. Our approach provides a principled framework for understanding when classification is inherently fallible and fundamentally ambiguous.