arXiv:2603.15412v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The mammalian brain, most extensively studied in rodents and bats, solves an enormous variety of non-spatial cognitive tasks using neural circuitry...
arXiv:2606. 01868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has long served as a model for goal-directed animal behavior in neuroscience.
arXiv:2609.38383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random exploration reveals how an environment can be traversed before a goal is specified. Can this experience support long-range planning without po...
The paper introduces ELiSe, a model that leverages cortical network scaffolds and dendritic compartments to learn complex non‑Markovian spatio‑temporal patterns using only local, always‑on, phase‑free synaptic plasticity. It demonstrates the model’s ability to acquire and replay intricate sequences, exemplified by a birdsong learning mock‑up, and shows robustness to external disturbances and flexibility in parameter settings.
Compact Bellman-Grounded Cognitive Maps (BCM) are introduced as a new method for cost-aware navigation that reuses a single learned map for different goals without per-goal retraining. BCM grounds the map in local edge costs using a self-supervised Bellman objective and a compact coordinate encoding, achieving near-optimal performance on weighted grids up to 1600 nodes with only a 5% mean gap to exact Dijkstra search. Its memory footprint grows sublinearly with graph size, outperforming connectivity-based spectral baselines and demonstrating scalability to complex environments.
arXiv:2602. 01196v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recurrent neural policies are widely used in partially observable control and meta-RL tasks.
arXiv:2609.16752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cognitive Field Theory (CFT) proposes that cognition arises from memory-dressed collective dynamics that generate a persistent macroscopic cognitive fi...
The paper investigates whether enhancing goal representations improves goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) performance. By creating an exact temporal-distance goal representation in deterministic mazes and systematically degrading its geometric quality, the authors find that changes in goal representation have little effect on performance. In contrast, degrading the agent’s current state representation more than doubles failure rates, indicating that state representation is the critical bottleneck. The study further demonstrates that simple random Fourier positional encodings can significantly boost performance on challenging navigation tasks without additional map or objective modifications.
arXiv:2606. 14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning.
arXiv:2607. 10430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dimensionality reduction has proven powerful for identifying neural manifolds, which are low-dimensional structures underlying high-dimensional neural activity.
arXiv:2608. 12308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to integrate visual evidence over time, plan future actions, and determine when it has reached a navigation goal under partial observability.
The study investigates whether sensory-aligned receptive fields provide computational benefits beyond mere resource efficiency in recurrent networks of Expressive Leaky Memory neurons. Across auditory and event-based visual classification tasks, receptive fields aligned with task-relevant sensory coordinates improve test accuracy compared to budget-matched random fields, but this advantage disappears when coordinates are scrambled or irrelevant. The benefit diminishes as neuronal expressivity increases, and generic synaptic sparsity regularization only partially recovers performance, indicating that structured receptive fields act as a computational prior beyond sparsity alone.