Topic: memory-dependent tasks

Mounting evidence suggests that traveling waves are a key dynamical motif in biological neural information processing systems [Muller et al., 2018], yet their precise computational role remains under investigation. While the Transformer architecture [Vaswani et al., 2023] has achieved state-of-the-art performance across various data modalities, it relies heavily on an explicit `context’ – processing the entire input sequence simultaneously. This approach is both biologically implausible and computationally inefficient, resulting in quadratic complexity relative to sequence length. Recent inter