ARTIFICIAL KURAMOTO OSCILLATORY NEURONS

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission923 Authors

Keywords: Oscillatory neurons, Feature binding, Object-centric learning, Reasoning, Adversarial robustness

TL;DR: Oscillatory neurons strongly bind object features, can reason, and are robust to adversarial and natural perturbations

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.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 923