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Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons (arxiv.org)
1 point by jerlendds 8 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of switching on and off like ordinary artificial neurons, these units are tiny oscillators that lock their timing together to bind related signals into shared representations. That synchronization beat standard on/off neurons on tasks from spotting objects to reasoning.

Abstract

It has long been known in both neuroscience and AI that ``binding'' between neurons leads to a form of competitive learning where representations are compressed in order to represent more abstract concepts in deeper layers of the network. More recently, it was also hypothesized that dynamic (spatiotemporal) representations play an important role in both neuroscience and AI. Building on these ideas, we introduce Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons (AKOrN) as a dynamical alternative to threshold units, which can be combined with arbitrary connectivity designs such as fully connected, convolutional, or attentive mechanisms. Our generalized Kuramoto updates bind neurons together through their synchronization dynamics. We show that this idea provides performance improvements across a wide spectrum of tasks such as unsupervised object discovery, adversarial robustness, calibrated uncertainty quantification, and reasoning. We believe that these empirical results show the importance of rethinking our assumptions at the most basic neuronal level of neural representation, and in particular show the importance of dynamical representations. Code:https://github.com/autonomousvision/akorn Project page:https://takerum.github.io/akorn_project_page/

Takeru Miyato, Sindy Löwe, Andreas Geiger, Max Welling
arXiv:2410.13821 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Oct 17, 2024 · updated May 16, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted for Oral presentation at ICLR2025

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