Sparse coding is an important method for unsupervised learning of task-independent features in theoretical neuroscience models of neural coding. While a number of algorithms exist to learn these representations from the statistics of a dataset, they largely ignore the information bottlenecks present in fiber pathways connecting cortical areas… For example, the visual pathway has many fewer neurons transmitting visual information to cortex than the number of photoreceptors. Both empirical and analytic results have recently shown that sparse representations can be […]

Lossy gradient compression has become a practical tool to overcome the communication bottleneck in centrally coordinated distributed training of machine learning models. However, algorithms for decentralized training with compressed communication over arbitrary connected networks have been more complicated, requiring additional memory and hyperparameters… We introduce a simple algorithm that directly compresses the model differences between neighboring workers using low-rank linear compressors. We prove that our method does not require any additional hyperparameters, converges faster than prior methods, and is asymptotically […]

The idea of federated learning is to collaboratively train a neural network on a server. Each user receives the current weights of the network and in turns sends parameter updates (gradients) based on local data… This protocol has been designed not only to train neural networks data-efficiently, but also to provide privacy benefits for users, as their input data remains on device and only parameter gradients are shared. But how secure is sharing parameter gradients? Previous attacks have provided a […]

How do animals learn? This remains an elusive question in neuroscience… Whereas reinforcement learning often focuses on the design of algorithms that enable artificial agents to efficiently learn new tasks, here we develop a modeling framework to directly infer the empirical learning rules that animals use to acquire new behaviors. Our method efficiently infers the trial-to-trial changes in an animal’s policy, and decomposes those changes into a learning component and a noise component. Specifically, this allows us to: (i) compare […]

Developmental machine learning studies how artificial agents can model the way children learn open-ended repertoires of skills. Such agents need to create and represent goals, select which ones to pursue and learn to achieve them… Recent approaches have considered goal spaces that were either fixed and hand-defined or learned using generative models of states. This limited agents to sample goals within the distribution of known effects. We argue that the ability to imagine out-of-distribution goals is key to enable creative […]