Topic: nonlinearly mixed representations

Humans and animals routinely generalize their behavior to situations they have never encountered before, often by understanding them in terms of familiar components arranged in unfamiliar combinations. This kind of compositional generalization is thought to be a cornerstone of intelligent behavior. Uncovering the underlying neural mechanisms is a long-standing challenge in computational neuroscience, and both theoretical and experimental works have suggested that subjects generalize in part through learning a representation that encodes the compositional structure (Whittington et al., 2020; It