A deep learning framework for neuroscience

This article, published in Nature neuroscience in 2019, emerged from a workshop on optimization in the brain that happened February 24-28, 2019 at the Bellairs Research Institute of McGill University and in which I participated. The complete list of authors includes famous researchers from the fields of AI and neuroscience. The paper has been cited more than 1500 times.

Abstract

Systems neuroscience seeks explanations for how the brain implements a wide variety of perceptual, cognitive and motor tasks. Conversely, artificial intelligence attempts to design computational systems based on the tasks they will have to solve. In artificial neural networks, the three components specified by design are the objective functions, the learning rules and the architectures. With the growing success of deep learning, which utilizes brain-inspired architectures, these three designed components have increasingly become central to how we model, engineer and optimize complex artificial learning systems. Here we argue that a greater focus on these components would also benefit systems neuroscience. We give examples of how this optimization-based framework can drive theoretical and experimental progress in neuroscience. We contend that this principled perspective on systems neuroscience will help to generate more rapid progress.

Authors

Blake A. Richards, Timothy P. Lillicrap, Philippe Beaudoin, Yoshua Bengio, Rafal Bogacz, Amelia Christensen, Claudia Clopath, Rui Ponte Costa, Archy de Berker, Surya Ganguli, Colleen J. Gillon, Danijar Hafner, Adam Kepecs, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Peter Latham, Grace W. Lindsay, Kenneth D. Miller, Richard Naud, Christopher C. Pack, Panayiota Poirazi, Pieter Roelfsema, João Sacramento, Andrew Saxe, Benjamin Scellier, Anna C. Schapiro, Walter Senn, Greg Wayne, Daniel Yamins, Friedemann Zenke, Joel Zylberberg, Denis Therien, Konrad P. Kording

Cite this article

Richards, B.A., Lillicrap, T.P., Beaudoin, P. et al. A deep learning framework for neuroscience. Nat Neurosci 22, 1761–1770 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0520-2

Download the full citation from Nature neuroscience.

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