Shunting Inhibition and Dendritic Branching Shape Local Credit Assignment

Houman Safaai; Maceo Richards; Bernardo L. Sabatini

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arXiv · 2607.03556

Shunting Inhibition and Dendritic Branching Shape Local Credit Assignment

Houman Safaai·Maceo Richards·Bernardo L. Sabatini

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Abstract

Biological neurons assign credit across branching dendrites, where synaptic drive, conductance, local voltage, and somatic teaching signals interact to shape plasticity. We study conductance-based dendritic networks with excitatory and inhibitory synapses, shunting inhibition, and tree-structured branch-to-soma coupling, asking when restricted somatic feedback can approximate compartment-specific backpropagated errors. Exact gradients factor into a synapse-local eligibility term, set by presynaptic activity, driving force, and input resistance, and a path-specific compartment error obtained by transporting a somatic error through dendritic gains. This turns local learning into a credit-signal approximation problem. We test whether shunting improves learning when its effect on dendritic gain makes compartment errors more compatible with restricted feedback. Exact-gradient reconstruction verifies the factorization, while path-gain, feedback-fidelity, inhibition-intervention, and transported-error controls probe the mechanism and its limits. With nonnegative conductances and a five-factor rule using matched-width feedback with scalar fallback, shunting LocalCA remains 5 to 6 percentage points below matched backpropagation on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and figure-ground MNIST, showing that feedback fidelity remains a major bottleneck. A three-factor rule approaches matched backpropagation with exact transported feedback in the shunting model and with neuron-wise feedback in both architectures, but shunting has no general advantage under matched initialization. These results show how conductance and dendritic branching enter the exact credit equation and identify restricted feedback as a principal limit.

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Houman Safaai, Maceo Richards, Bernardo L. Sabatini. 2026-07-03. Shunting Inhibition and Dendritic Branching Shape Local Credit Assignment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03556

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