Alexei Koulakov

Anthony Zador, Sean Escola, Blake Richards et al. · stanford

Neuroscience has long been an essential driver of progress in artificial intelligence (AI). We propose that to accelerate progress in AI, we must invest in fundamental research in NeuroAI. A core component of this is the embodied Turing test, which challenges AI animal models to interact with the sensorimotor world at skill levels akin to their living counterparts. The embodied Turing test shifts the focus from those capabilities like game playing and language that are especially well-developed or uniquely human to those capabilities, inherited from over 500 million years of evolution, that are shared with all animals. Building models that can pass the embodied Turing test will provide a roadmap for the next generation of AI.

Farhad Pashakhanloo, Alexei Koulakov

Representational drift refers to over-time changes in neural activation accompanied by a stable task performance. Despite being observed in the brain and in artificial networks, the mechanisms of drift and its implications are not fully understood. Motivated by recent experimental findings of stimulus-dependent drift in the piriform cortex, we use theory and simulations to study this phenomenon in a two-layer linear feedforward network. Specifically, in a continual online learning scenario, we study the drift induced by the noise inherent in the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). By decomposing the learning dynamics into the normal and tangent spaces of the minimum-loss manifold, we show the former corresponds to a finite variance fluctuation, while the latter could be considered as an effective diffusion process on the manifold. We analytically compute the fluctuation and the diffusion coefficients for the stimuli representations in the hidden layer as functions of network parameters and input distribution. Further, consistent with experiments, we show that the drift rate is slower for a more frequently presented stimulus. Overall, our analysis yields a theoretical framework for better understanding of the drift phenomenon in biological and artificial neural networks.

Sergey Shuvaev, Khue Tran, Khristina Samoilova et al.

The olfactory system employs responses of an ensemble of odorant receptors (ORs) to sense molecules and to generate olfactory percepts. Here we hypothesized that ORs can be viewed as 3D spatial filters that extract molecular features relevant to the olfactory system, similarly to the spatio-temporal filters found in other sensory modalities. To build these filters, we trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict human olfactory percepts obtained from several semantic datasets. Our neural network, the DeepNose, produced responses that are approximately invariant to the molecules' orientation, due to its equivariant architecture. Our network offers high-fidelity perceptual predictions for different olfactory datasets. In addition, our approach allows us to identify molecular features that contribute to specific perceptual descriptors. Because the DeepNose network is designed to be aligned with the biological system, our approach predicts distinct perceptual qualities for different stereoisomers. The architecture of the DeepNose relying on the processing of several molecules at the same time permits inferring the perceptual quality of odor mixtures. We propose that the DeepNose network can use 3D molecular shapes to generate high-quality predictions for human olfactory percepts and help identify molecular features responsible for odor quality.