Adult Neurogenesis Enhances Pattern Separation

Description

Classically, neurogenesis (birth of neurons) was impossible for adult mammals. Since the second half of the last century, evidence has suggested that adult-born neurons exist in the dentate gyrus (DG) and the olfactory system. Suppressing adult neurogenesis in DG can result in the impairment of discriminating similar memories but not very-different memories. Also, studies found that eliminating adult neurogenesis may link to mood disorders. These results indicate that adult neurogenesis plays a vital role in neural processing. However, how adult neurogenesis contributes to neural information processing remains open. In our recent work, synaptic competition, a process taking part in adult neurogenesis, is essential for pattern separation. Also, we have designed an unsupervised learning rule based on synaptic competition. The learning rule outperforms back-propagation in some classification tasks, e.g., distinguishing digits from the MNIST dataset. Our results suggest that synaptic competition is the key to pattern separation and that competition-based learning could be helpful in machine learning.

Period	6 Dec 2022
Event title	Symposium on Bridging Physics with Neuroscience and Machine Learning
Event type	Other
Location	Hong Kong, Hong Kong, ChinaShow on map