Two studies find “self-supervised” models, which learn about their environment from unlabeled data, can show activity patterns similar to those of the mammalian brain.
Anne Trafton | MIT News
To make our way through the world, our brain must develop an intuitive understanding of the physical world around us, which we then use to interpret sensory information coming into the brain.
How does the brain develop that intuitive understanding? Many scientists believe that it may use a process similar to what’s known as “self-supervised learning.” This type of machine learning, originally developed as a way to create more efficient models for computer vision, allows computational models to learn about visual scenes based solely on the similarities and differences between them, with no labels or other information.
A pair of studies from researchers at the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center at MIT offers new evidence supporting this hypothesis. The researchers found that when they trained models known as neural networks using a particular type of self-supervised learning, the resulting models generated activity patterns very similar to those seen in the brains of animals that were performing the same tasks as the models.
The findings suggest that these models are able to learn representations of the physical world that they can use to make accurate predictions about what will happen in that world, and that the mammalian brain may be using the same strategy, the researchers say.
“The theme of our work is that AI designed to help build better robots ends up also being a framework to better understand the brain more generally,” says Aran Nayebi, a postdoc in the ICoN Center. “We can’t say if it’s the whole brain yet, but across scales and disparate brain areas, our results seem to be suggestive of an organizing principle.”
Nayebi is the lead author of one of the studies, co-authored with Rishi Rajalingham, a former MIT postdoc now at Meta Reality Labs, and senior authors Mehrdad Jazayeri, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research; and Robert Yang, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences and an associate member of the McGovern Institute. Ila Fiete, director of the ICoN Center, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and an associate member of the McGovern Institute, is the senior author of the other study, which was co-led by Mikail Khona, an MIT graduate student, and Rylan Schaeffer, a former senior research associate at MIT.
Both studies will be presented at the 2023 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in December...
Read the full article on the MIT News website using the link below.