arXiv Machine Learning

Same Compression Principle, Different Geometry: Rate-Distortion Signatures Dissociate Biological and Artificial Visual Systems

arXiv:2603. 01568v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient coding theory predicts that biological perceptual systems compress sensory input optimally under resource constraints, with the systematic structure of errors reflecting the geometry of that compression.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

A Synonymous Variational Perspective on the Rate-Distortion-Perception Tradeoff

arXiv:2604. 14603v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The fundamental limit of natural signal compression has traditionally been characterized by classical rate-distortion (RD) theory through the tradeoff between coding rate and reconstruction distortion, while the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) framework introduces a divergence-based measure of perceptual quality as a modeling principle, leaving its theoretical origin unclear.

By Zijian Liang, Kai Niu, Changshuo Wang, Jin Xu, Ping Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

The Computational Value of Sensory-Aligned Receptive Fields Depends on Neuronal Expressivity

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.

By Agnese Adorante, Aaron Spieler, Anna Levina