Parameter efficient dendritic-tree neurons outperform perceptrons

Ziwen Han; Evgeniya Gorobets; Pan Chen

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arXiv · 2207.00708

Parameter efficient dendritic-tree neurons outperform perceptrons

Ziwen Han·Evgeniya Gorobets·Pan Chen

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Abstract

Biological neurons are more powerful than artificial perceptrons, in part due to complex dendritic input computations. Inspired to empower the perceptron with biologically inspired features, we explore the effect of adding and tuning input branching factors along with input dropout. This allows for parameter efficient non-linear input architectures to be discovered and benchmarked. Furthermore, we present a PyTorch module to replace multi-layer perceptron layers in existing architectures. Our initial experiments on MNIST classification demonstrate the accuracy and generalization improvement of dendritic neurons compared to existing perceptron architectures.

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Ziwen Han, Evgeniya Gorobets, Pan Chen. 2022-07-02. Parameter efficient dendritic-tree neurons outperform perceptrons. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.00708

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