Randall O’Reilly et al have just published a new paper that refines a previous version of their Deep Predictive Learning paper that was highly commented in this forum last year.
I will need some time to go through it and digest it, but it is probably worth the effort.
Availalbe here:
Deep Predictive Learning in Neocortex and Pulvinar
Randall C. O’Reilly, Jacob L. Russin, Maryam Zolfaghar, John Rohrlich
How does the human brain learn new concepts from raw sensory experience, without explicit instruction? We still do not have a widely-accepted answer to this central question. Here, we propose a detailed biological mechanism for the widely-embraced idea that learning is based on the differences between predictions and actual outcomes (i.e., predictive error-driven learning). Specifically, numerous weak projections into the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus generate top-down predictions, and sparse, focal driver inputs from lower areas supply the actual outcome, originating in layer 5 intrinsic bursting (5IB) neurons. Thus, the outcome is only briefly activated, roughly every 100 msec (i.e., 10 Hz, alpha), resulting in a temporal difference error signal, which drives local synaptic changes throughout the neocortex, resulting in a biologically-plausible form of error backpropagation learning. We implemented these mechanisms in a large-scale model of the visual system, and found that the simulated inferotemporal (IT) pathway learns to systematically categorize 3D objects according to invariant shape properties, based solely on predictive learning from raw visual inputs. These categories match human judgments on the same stimuli, and are consistent with neural representations in IT cortex in primates.
The link to the discussion about their previous paper: