Learning dynamics

Workshop bringing together researchers working on AI for learning dynamics from data, with a special focus on information-theoretic methods. Topics include predictive information, the information bottleneck, latent-variable models, entropy and mutual-information estimation, world models of biological systems, and connections to dynamical systems and control theory. The workshop is part of the six-week NITMB program “Image-Based Scientific Machine Learning for Theories of Biological Dynamics Across Scales” (February 1–March 12, 2027). Program: AI in Biological Dynamics Scientific Focus

Although reinforcement learning has been highly successful in training artificial agents to perform a wide variety of complex tasks, the principles governing how animals actually learn to perform new tasks remain poorly understood. While normative approaches have provided profound insights into the design of optimal agents, they often make assumptions that may not be aligned with the sub-optimal learning strategies employed by animals in experimental settings. Even in simplified two-alternate force choice task, mice have shown significant variability in learning dynamics despite highly standar

Deep learning provides new data-driven tools to relate neural activity to perception and cognition, aiding scientists in developing theories of neural computation that increasingly resemble biological systems both at the level of behavior and of neural activity. But what in a deep neural network should correspond to what in a biological system? This question is addressed implicitly in the use of comparison measures that relate specific neural or behavioral dimensions via a particular functional form. However, distinct comparison methodologies can give conflicting results in recovering even a k

…on both the task structure and the learning rule. Previous works have analyzed the dynamical equations describing learning in the relatively simplified context of the perceptron under assumptions of a student-teacher framework or a linearized output. While these assumptions have facilitated theoretical insights, they have precluded a detailed exploration of the roles of the nonlinearity and input-data distribution in determining the learning dynamics, limiting the applicability of the theories to real biological

…studies focus on the end-result of the learning process by measuring and comparing the similarities in the representations of object categories once they have been formed. However, the process of how these representations emerge—that is, the behavioral changes and intermediate stages observed during the acquisition—is less often directly and empirically compared. In this talk, I'm going to report a detailed investigation of the learning dy

Learning in biological systems takes place in contexts and with dynamics not often accounted for by simple models. I will describe the learning dynamics of two model systems that incorporate either architectural or dynamic constraints from biological observations. In the first case, inspired by the observed mesoscopic structure of the mouse brain as revealed by the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, as well as multiple examples of parallel pathways in mammalian brains, I present a mathematical analysis of learning dynamics in networks that have parallel computational pathways driven by the

Cognitive maps confer animals with flexible intelligence by representing spatial, temporal, and abstract relationships that can be used to shape thought, planning, and behavior. Cognitive maps have been observed in the hippocampus, but their algorithmic form and the processes by which they are learned remain obscure. Here, we employed large-scale, longitudinal two-photon calcium imaging to record activity from thousands of neurons in the CA1 region of the hippocampus while mice learned to efficiently collect rewards from two subtly different versions of linear tracks in virtual reality. The r

Deep neural network learning dynamics are very complex with large numbers of learnable weights and many sources of disorder. In this talk, I will discuss mean field approaches to analyze the learning dynamics of neural networks in large system size limits when starting from random initial conditions. The result of this analysis is a dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) where all neurons obey independent stochastic single site dynamics. Correlation functions (kernels) and response functions for the features and gradients at each layer can be computed self-consistently from these stochastic proces

…pathways of information flow impact learning dynamics within an architecture. Because of the gating, these networks can compute nonlinear functions of their input. We derive an exact reduction and, for certain cases, exact solutions to the dynamics of learning. The reduction takes the form of a neural race with an implicit bias towards shared representations, which then govern the model’s ability to syste

…However, the dynamics of when and how fast a network will discover good representations are not well understood, even when network training is governed by gradient descent. The potential complexity of learning dynamics is particularly apparent in so called insight moments, when useful task representations are discovered suddenly following a delay during which no learning is noticeable. Such insights are commonly observed in animals and humans, where they are often taken to refl