Input-driven circuit reconfiguration in critical recurrent neural networks
This work addresses the challenge of brain-inspired circuit reconfiguration for technological applications, but it is incremental as it builds on known critical dynamics and specific problem-solving.
The authors tackled the problem of dynamically reconfiguring neural circuits without altering synaptic weights by using input-driven mechanisms in a critical recurrent network, demonstrating that it solves the classical connectedness problem by controlling signal propagation based on input frequencies.
Changing a circuit dynamically, without actually changing the hardware itself, is called reconfiguration, and is of great importance due to its manifold technological applications. Circuit reconfiguration appears to be a feature of the cerebral cortex, and hence understanding the neuroarchitectural and dynamical features underlying self-reconfiguration may prove key to elucidate brain function. We present a very simple single-layer recurrent network, whose signal pathways can be reconfigured "on the fly" using only its inputs, with no changes to its synaptic weights. We use the low spatio-temporal frequencies of the input to landscape the ongoing activity, which in turn permits or denies the propagation of traveling waves. This mechanism uses the inherent properties of dynamically-critical systems, which we guarantee through unitary convolution kernels. We show this network solves the classical connectedness problem, by allowing signal propagation only along the regions to be evaluated for connectedness and forbidding it elsewhere.