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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Persistent Memory Through Triple-Loop Consolidation Under Stochastic Unit Turnover

Dissipative cognitive architectures maintain computation through continuous energy expenditure, where units that exhaust their energy are stochastically replaced with fresh random state. This creates a fundamental challenge: how can persistent, context-specific memory survive when all learnable state is periodically destroyed? Existing memory mechanisms -- including elastic weight consolidation, synaptic intelligence, and surprise-driven gating -- rely on gradient computation and are inapplicable to systems that do not perform it. We introduce Deep Memory (DM), a backpropagation-free persistent memory mechanism operating through a triple-loop consolidation cycle: (1) recording of expert-specific content centroids, (2) seeding of replaced units with stored representations, and (3) stabilization through continuous re-entry. Discrete expert routing via Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) gating is required, in the regimes tested, to prevent the centroid convergence that would render stored memories identical. We derive a Foster-Lyapunov drift bound for the full triple loop, showing that seeding rescales the turnover noise floor. Across $1{,}007$ simulation runs over thirteen blocks: (i) removing stable context-expert binding removes specialization ($\mathrm{MI}=1.10$ vs. $0.001$; $n=91$); (ii) DM achieves $R=0.984$ vs. $0.385$ without memory ($n=16$); (iii) continuous seeding reconstructs representations after interference ($R_\mathrm{recon}=0.978$; one-shot fails; $n=30$); (iv) the mechanism operates within a characterized $(K,p)$ envelope ($n=350$); (v) recording $\times$ seeding is the minimal critical dyad ($n=40$); (vi) associative and reservoir baselines (Hopfield, ESN) are compared under matched turnover ($n=370$). DM is thus a falsifiable, bounded mechanism for persistent memory in backpropagation-free cognitive systems, with functional parallels to hippocampal consolidation.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Axonal delay dispersion decides whether a neuron detects an event or a sequence, and predicts cortical column diameter

Cortical neurons fire sparsely -- often fewer than one spike per sensory window -- making rate coding insufficient and temporal coding a necessity. That conduction delays convert firing order into synchrony is long established. What governs which class of temporal feature a neuron detects -- one volley of coincident input, or two in a particular order -- has not been examined. We propose a delay-signature framework in which the axonal conduction delays converging on a dendritic branch constitute a physical key: only input sequences whose spike-time differences the delays compensate arrive synchronously, and coincidence detection, via calcium plateau thresholds, converts that synchrony into an all-or-none output. In simulations of an integrator-neuron model we report three results. First, a single physical scalar -- the dispersion of the delay set -- moves a population from event detection to order-selective sequence detection. The transition is emergent under random delays and connectivity: at narrow dispersion sequence detectors do not exist, and the dispersion at which they overtake event detectors tracks the inter-event interval with a slope statistically indistinguishable from one. This maps a computational distinction onto the anatomical one between myelinated and unmyelinated projections, making myelination a switch on what a neuron computes, not only a regulator of speed. Second, the same dispersion sets the code's limits: it bounds the longest codable interval and fixes an absolute timing tolerance of about a millisecond, with slowing better tolerated than speeding. Third, that millisecond window and horizontal conduction velocity together predict cortical column diameter, and the two areas with direct measurements fall where the relation puts them. One anatomically measurable parameter thus sets what a neuron detects and the limits of what it can represent.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

A Roadmap for MEG Foundation Models

Foundation models are beginning to reshape brain-signal analysis by moving the field beyond task-specific decoding pipelines toward reusable models pretrained on broad neural datasets. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a compelling but still underdeveloped target for this shift: it captures human cortical dynamics at millisecond resolution while offering stronger spatial interpretability than EEG, making it especially valuable for source-resolved studies of perception, language, cognition, and clinical brain function. Yet MEG foundation models remain at an early stage, with only a small number of MEG-specific and MEG-inclusive multi-modal models, modest pretraining corpora, and emerging but still limited benchmarks. This perspective lays down the basic concepts needed to understand MEG foundation models and provides a didactic overview of the field's key design choices, including tokenization, sensor- versus source-space representations, sensor-geometry encoding, backbone architectures, self-supervised objectives, and pretraining data. We then offer a roadmap for future development, organized around native MEG pretraining, adaptation of EEG foundation models, transfer from generic time-series models, and multi-modal integration with EEG, fMRI, MRI, behaviour, and stimulus features. We highlight the need for coordinated infrastructure, including diverse and reusable MEG datasets, rigorous evaluation across subjects, sites, tasks, and clinical settings, and responsible data-sharing practices that address consent, privacy, access, and governance.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

Higher-order rich clubs and configuration models on general directed hypergraphs

Detecting structure in complex networks, especially those arising from physical systems, is a central problem across the sciences. One approach is via rich club analysis, which identifies important vertices using a centrality metric and measures whether those vertices are more tightly interconnected than expected by chance. While informative, this approach captures only pairwise interactions, missing out on higher-order ones known to shape the structure and function of many complex systems. We propose a hyper-rich club pipeline that asks whether central vertices are more tightly interconnected than expected by chance through hyperedges encoding higher-order interactions, which also enables the inclusion of important, often omitted, directional information. We work in a broad class of hypergraphs, which we call general directed hypergraphs, that includes as special cases undirected hypergraphs, head-and-tail directed hypergraphs, and totally ordered hypergraphs (a hypergraph related to directed simplicial complexes from topological data analysis). This unifies several non-equivalent notions of directed hypergraph under one definition. On these hypergraphs we define a hyper-rich club framework whose concrete construction depends on explicit choices the domain scientist fixes according to their research goals. Particular choices recover the existing rich club notions for graphs and undirected hypergraphs, and yield the first such notion for each version of directed hypergraphs. We demonstrate that the pipeline recovers meaningful structure in data by studying networks of very different origins: connectomes, temporal networks of infectious spread, networks of poems, and the XGI hypergraph database, in each case detecting structure the standard graph rich club misses.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

Dynamical stability for dense patterns in attractor neural networks

Recurrent neural networks are canonical models of biological memory. In these models, memories are represented by distributed patterns of neural activity that are stored in the recurrent connections between neurons, such that they become attractors of the network's dynamics. During memory recall, network dynamics thus converge toward one of these memory patterns when started from a noisy or partial cue. Therefore, memory performance critically hinges on the dynamical stability of the stored patterns. However, previous theoretical approaches only studied dynamical stability under highly restrictive conditions that do not readily apply to biological neural circuits. Here, we develop a theory of the local stability of discrete fixed points in a broad class of networks with graded neural activities and in the presence of noise. Using methods from random matrix theory, we analyze the bulk and outliers of the eigenvalue spectra of the Jacobians that characterize network dynamics around fixed points. We show that either all fixed points are stable or all of them are unstable, depending on whether their number is below a ``critical load for stability'', which is distinct from the classical critical capacity that measures the maximal number of achievable fixed points regardless of their stability. We further analyze the dependence of this critical load for stability on experimentally measurable quantities characterizing the statistics of memory patterns and the activation functions of neurons. Our analysis highlights the computational benefits of sparse-like patterns and threshold-linear activation functions and offers testable predictions for neural circuits supporting memory.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2026

Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex

Natural scenes are complex arrangements of objects, surfaces, and backgrounds. For the brain's visual system to effectively operate, it needs to extract not only what objects are present, but also their spatial and semantic relations. We hypothesize that such structures may be learned, in a self-supervised fashion, by exploiting temporal regularities of natural active vision: each fixation reveals a glimpse that is related to the previous one via co-occurrence and saccade-conditioned spatial regularities. We instantiate this idea with Glimpse Prediction Networks (GPNs), recurrent models trained to predict the embedding of the next glimpse along human-like scanpaths. GPNs are shown to successfully extract complex scene information, including object co-occurrences and spatial object arrangements, and integrate information across glimpses. Importantly, GPN representations align strongly with human fMRI responses in mid and higher-level visual cortex and match, often outperform, alternative state-of-the-art ANN models, establishing next-glimpse-prediction as a biologically plausible route towards brain-aligned scene representations.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

Why shared attention vectors fail: a case for outcome-indexed tuning

Dimensional attention in learning is often implemented as a globally shared attention vector, where each stimulus dimension corresponds to a single scalar. These scalars are learned by models through gradient-descent on error, where predictive features acquire more salience. We show that under multi-outcome learning, where models predict more than one outcome, this shared vector becomes unstable; it collapses to its bounds and prevents the models from learning meaningful attentional tunings for learning and generalization. We address this by introducing an outcome-indexed attentional matrix that converts globally shared attentional tuning into an outcome-indexed representation. We present an analysis of the unstable shared vectors and derive the conditions under which it holds. Empirically, three synthetic experiments benchmark the proposed attention matrices and show that they converge to meaningful representations, something shared attention vectors fail to do. These results suggest that outcome-indexed attentional matrices are a general fix for gradient-based attentional processes, which improves models of learning under multi-outcome conditions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

XAI-Refine: An Automated Explanation-Knowledge Loop for Brain-Age Prediction

Brain-age prediction models are commonly evaluated by predictive accuracy, yet accurate predictions alone do not establish that a model relies on reproducible or neurobiologically supported mechanisms. Post-hoc explanation methods can expose these mechanisms, but existing workflows typically stop at diagnosis or require correction targets to be specified before model analysis. We propose XAI-Refine, an automated explanation-knowledge loop for brain-age prediction from resting-state functional connectivity. At each iteration, XAI-Refine consolidates complementary post-hoc analyses across repeated training runs into reliable, structured model explanations. It converts each reliable explanation into a neutral neurobiological question, retrieves and verifies relevant literature, and compiles the verified evidence into an admissible set in the same typed explanation space. The target for refinement is defined as the minimal projection of the current model explanation onto the admissible set induced by applicable verified knowledge. This revised explanation is then translated into a differentiable constraint while preserving the originating model variable, measurement operator, and applicable scope. Candidate updates are promoted only when multi-seed validation confirms target-directed explanatory movement, predictive performance remains within a prespecified guardrail, and non-target explanatory drift remains bounded. Experiments on functional-connectivity-based brain-age prediction evaluate predictive performance, explanation reliability, literature alignment, and target-specific model revision, illustrating a structured route from post-hoc analysis to evidence-guided model refinement.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Perceived face similarity reflects inverse-generative and naturalistic discriminative objectives

The perceptual representations supporting our ability to recognize faces remain a computational mystery. Deep neural networks offer mechanistic hypotheses for human face perception, but theoretically distinct models often make indistinguishable representational predictions for randomly sampled faces. To expose diagnostic differences among these hypotheses, we compared six neural network models sharing an architecture but trained on distinct tasks, using face pairs optimized to elicit contrasting model predictions ("controversial" pairs) alongside randomly sampled pairs. We tested model predictions against face-dissimilarity judgments from 864 human participants across stimulus sets differing in realism and pose variation. Models prioritizing high-level, invariant structures (trained via inverse rendering, face identification, or object classification) most robustly matched human judgments. Furthermore, models trained on natural images typically outperformed synthetic-trained counterparts. Together, these findings suggest that human face perception is shaped by mechanisms that infer latent causes of facial appearance, discount nuisance variation, and are tuned by natural image statistics.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

EmoMind: Decoding Affective Captions from Human Brain fMRI

Decoding visual experience from brain activity has advanced substantially, but current brain-to-text systems largely recover semantic content while discarding affect. Additionally, language models can generate emotional text when prompted with categorical labels, but such labels collapse rich inter-subject variability into coarse discrete bins. We present EmoMind, the first end-to-end pipeline for decoding affective captions directly from fMRI signals. EmoMind first retrieves a semantically grounded neutral scene description from brain-decoded visual features, then rewrites it using a continuous 34-dimensional emotion vector decoded from the same fMRI recording. To control the balance between content preservation and affective expression, we train the rewriter with classifier-free guidance against an identity-preserving null branch, enabling smooth interpolation between semantic fidelity and affective expressivity. We evaluate affective caption generation with a three-axis validation framework spanning subject-specificity, structural geometry, and causal control. We further augment this framework with a synthetic-brain substitution test that probes robustness to the measurement apparatus, and we benchmark each axis against GPT-4 prompted with brain-decoded top-5 emotion labels as a strong discrete baseline. Across two independent emotion fMRI datasets, EmoMind significantly outperforms label-prompted GPT-4 on all three axes, with the largest gains on metrics that require person-specific affective structure rather than population-level emotion aggregation. These results establish continuous brain-decoded affect as a viable control signal for individualized affective caption generation and open new directions for studying individual affective brain organisation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Geometric Reliability of Neural Population Codes: Sampling Calibration and Within-Session Nonstationarity

Trial-to-trial variability limits how reliably neural population geometry can be estimated, while comparisons across populations depend on neuron and trial counts, response quality, and clustered sampling. We quantified within-session geometric reliability using Shesha, the Spearman correlation between representational dissimilarity matrices estimated from independent trial subsets, in all 39 Steinmetz Neuropixels sessions and in olfactory bulb and piriform cortex recordings from Bolding and Franks. Steinmetz analyses matched neurons and repetitions, compared observed reliability with a stationary residual-bootstrap expectation, and used mouse-level or mouse-clustered inference. Mean matched reliability was 0.0402 across 312 area-by-session recordings. Regional differences and reliability above the stationary benchmark did not survive correction. Temporal effects received the strongest support: interleaving early and late trials increased reliability relative to blocked allocation ($Δ=0.02666$, $q=0.001953$), and RDM similarity declined with within-session lag (mean mouse-level slope $=-0.01912$, $q=0.001953$; $n=10$ mice). Outer-cross-fitted reliability was not associated with choice-direction coupling or stimulus or response-direction decoding after correction. Olfactory comparisons remained descriptive because few paired sessions and no animal identities were available. In held-out simulations, associative recurrence outperformed feedforward subspace denoising but not divisive normalization. Representational geometry became less reproducible with temporal separation within a session, and comparisons across neural populations require sampling calibration and independent inference.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Entangled Game Modules in Artificial General Intelligence

We introduce a probability-wave framework for modeling the collective behavior of interacting adaptive agents, deriving testable eigenmodes through a generalized behavioral intelligence (GBI) nonlocal probability-wave equation. This framework captures a broad range of human intelligence behaviors with analytical mechanisms and offers an indirect method to examine the Liu-Chen-Ao (LCA) hypothesis of nonlocal entangled nerve fibers in the brain through collective trader behaviors. Our empirical analysis of Chinese intraday stock market data demonstrates that adaptive entangled game modes explain 82-94% (89% overall) of observed decision patterns, a sharp contrast to the predictions of neoclassical finance based on independent rational agents. Moreover, 2-12% of behaviors show adaption to intraday news, events, and environments, characterized by dual equilibrium states and abrupt reference point shifts, while purely independent modes occur in less than 5% of cases. These findings empirically support the LCA hypothesis, as observable trading behaviors reflect underlying brain mechanisms and internal intelligence decision-making in behavioral psychology. Our results highlight the necessity of incorporating adaptive entangled game modules into artificial general intelligence (AGI) architectures, addressing the limitations of conventional artificial neural network (ANN)-based AI, which relies on trillions of opaque parameters. By integrating ANN-based AI with probability-wave-based entangled-brain simulations, machine learning can enrich AGI foundation models (FMs) and facilitate the development of human-like processing units (HPUs) that leverage brain-inspired mechanisms. Such HPUs may ultimately create more compact, efficient, and robust AGI systems, particularly for embodied intelligence and robotics.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

A New Strategy for Artificial Intelligence: Training Foundation Models Directly on Human Brain Data

While foundation models have achieved remarkable results across a diversity of domains, they still rely on human-generated data, such as text, as a fundamental source of knowledge. However, this data is ultimately the product of human brains, the filtered projection of a deeper neural complexity. In this paper, we explore a new strategy for artificial intelligence: moving beyond surface-level statistical regularities by training foundation models directly on human brain data. We hypothesize that neuroimaging data could open a window into elements of human cognition that are not accessible through observable actions, and argue that this additional knowledge could be used, alongside classical training data, to overcome some of the current limitations of foundation models. While previous research has demonstrated the possibility to train classical machine learning, deep learning, or reinforcement learning models on neural patterns, this path remains largely unexplored for high-level cognitive functions. Here, we classify the current limitations of foundation models, as well as the promising brain regions and cognitive processes that could be leveraged to address them, along four levels: perception, valuation, execution, and integration. Then, we propose two general methods that could be implemented to prioritize the use of limited neuroimaging data for strategically chosen, high-value steps in foundation model training: reinforcement learning from human brain (RLHB) and chain of thought from human brain (CoTHB). We also discuss the potential implications for agents, artificial general intelligence, and artificial superintelligence, as well as the ethical, social, and technical challenges and opportunities.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

Formation of structural attractors in neuromorphic systems

This paper examines the theory of Invariant Structural Learning (ISL), which proposes a non-optimization approach to concept formation. Learning is interpreted as convergence to structural attractors in a hypergraph space, rather than as the minimization of a global loss function. The paper presents the ISL model, including its mathematical formalization, computational verification, and a hypothetical neurobiological interpretation. The mathematical section introduces the formal apparatus of the structural reduction process and proves its finite convergence, the existence and uniqueness of class structural attractors, and the self-organization of attractor maps. The computational section demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach on classical image recognition tasks, utilizing the proposed learning mechanism without backpropagation and with extremely small training datasets. Finally, the neurobiological section formulates hypotheses regarding the possible implementation of structural attractors in dendritic trees, neural coding as a projection of internal attractor dynamics, and the development of neural architectures supporting the proposed learning concept. These hypotheses are discussed in the context of modern experimental data in the fields of dendritic computations, synaptic plasticity, and the structural organization of neural circuits. The proposed neurobiological mechanisms are presented as testable hypotheses rather than established biological facts. The results demonstrate the mathematical consistency and computational feasibility of the proposed model, while the neurobiological hypotheses outline potential directions for its experimental verification.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

What Does a System Modify When It Modifies Itself?

When a cognitive system modifies its own functioning, what exactly does it modify: a low-level rule, a control rule, or the criterion that evaluates its revisions? Cognitive science describes executive control, metacognition, and hierarchical learning, while artificial intelligence modifies policies, parameters, and learning mechanisms, but the two fields lack common criteria for comparing these transformations. We propose a minimal analytical model distinguishing functional rules Phi_t = {R0, ..., Rk}, modification mechanisms Mt, and evaluation criteria Nt. It separates two independent dimensions: the depth of the modified target and whether the modification is blind or reflexive. Internal representational access AtR and endogenous causal control AtC are further distinguished from external inspectability and modifiability by a designer. Four regimes are defined by the target of modification: action without organizational modification, modification of low-level rules, modification of control rules or mechanisms, and revision of the evaluation criterion. Each is related to cognitive phenomena and artificial systems while making explicit the system boundary on which attribution of endogenous self-modification depends. The comparison yields a conditional crossed-opacities hypothesis: humans often have richer endogenous self-description at abstract and strategic levels than at implementation levels, whereas current artificial systems may be externally inspectable and modifiable at operational levels without corresponding self-representation or endogenous control. The framework also identifies three difficulties - viability, evaluation of revisions to evaluation criteria, and continuity of identity - and proposes two empirical discriminants for identifying the target of a modification and the causal role of self-representation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Tensor-based Brain Surface Modeling and Analysis

We present a unified computational approach to tensor-based morphometry in detecting the brain surface shape differences between two clinical groups based on magnetic resonance images. Our approach is novel in a sense that we combined surface modeling, surface data smoothing and statistical analysis in a coherent unified mathematical framework. The cerebral cortex has the topology of a 2D highly convoluted sheet. Between two different clinical groups, the local surface area and curvature of the cortex may differ. It is highly likely that such surface shape differences are not uniform over the whole cortex. By computing how such surface metrics differ, the regions of the most rapid structural differences can be localized. To increase the signal to noise ratio, diffusion smoothing based on the explicit estimation of Laplace-Beltrami operator has been developed and applied to the surface metrics. As an illustration, we demonstrate how this new tensor-based surface morphometry can be applied in localizing the cortical regions of the gray matter tissue growth and loss in the brain images longitudinally collected in the group of children.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Prospective Coding Improves Learning in Deep Continuous-Time Recurrent Networks

Temporal integration gives continuous-time recurrent networks memory, but in deep stacks it also delays bottom-up signals and attenuates top-down errors. We develop Recursive Quadrature Filters (RQFs), biologically motivated complex-valued temporal filters that are a special case of diagonal state-space models (SSMs), and ask whether this failure mode can be addressed by making each layer's bottom-up input prospective. Starting from an energy model, we derive the RQF dynamics and show that each RQF is a band-pass filter whose learnable parameters control its tuning frequency and bandwidth. We then make each layer's bottom-up input prospective using a parameter-free two-tap update that leaves the recurrent transition and parallel scan unchanged. We extend this correction to general diagonal SSMs and show that it mitigates depth-dependent gradient attenuation when temporal gradients are truncated, i.e., spatial-only backpropagation. We evaluate the intervention in RQFs, S5, and ORGaNICs (a nonlinear gated RNN) trained using full backpropagation through time (BPTT) and spatial-only backpropagation. Under full BPTT, prospective variants match or outperform their non-prospective controls in every model and configuration. A non-residual width-32 six-layer RQF reaches 96.09% accuracy on raw-audio Speech Commands with 31.9k parameters; a width-64 six-layer RQF reaches 83.56% on the 16,384-step Path-X task. These results identify RQFs as a parameter-efficient recurrent substrate and prospective-input coding as an input-side correction for deep continuous-time recurrent networks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Inferring Affective Consciousness in an Artificial Agent: A Case Study

Creatures that display 'hedonic place preference behaviour' are thought by many scientists to experience feelings, on the assumption that their attraction to pleasure-producing substances which lack nutritional value (e.g. cocaine, morphine) cannot easily be attributed to unconscious instinctual behaviour. In this paper, we discuss how a simple artificial agent that instantiates attributes of an affective system engaging in felt uncertainty about its intrinsic needs in relation to environmental resources can similarly display hedonic place preference behaviour -- through an apparently subjective form of information processing -- while simultaneously being entirely deter-ministic. We outline some implications of this artificially engineered behaviour for our understanding of the physical basis of consciousness and the experience of free will.

cs.AI↗