Efficient and robust control with spikes that constrain free energy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biologically plausible spiking control framework based on free energy constraints, achieving efficient, sparse activity and high robustness to perturbations, with implications for understanding brain function and neuromorphic engineering.

Contribution

It presents a novel spiking control model that constrains free energy, combining biological realism with efficiency and robustness, advancing control algorithms and neuroscience understanding.

Findings

Networks operate with sparse activity while maintaining performance.

High resilience against external and internal perturbations.

Provides a new mathematical framework for spiking control based on free energy.

Abstract

Animal brains exhibit remarkable efficiency in perception and action, while being robust to both external and internal perturbations. The means by which brains accomplish this remains, for now, poorly understood, hindering our understanding of animal and human cognition, as well as our own implementation of efficient algorithms for control of dynamical systems.A potential candidate for a robust mechanism of state estimation and action computation is the free energy principle, but existing implementations of this principle have largely relied on conventional, biologically implausible approaches without spikes. We propose a novel, efficient, and robust spiking control framework with realistic biological characteristics. The resulting networks function as free energy constrainers, in which neurons only fire if they reduce the free energy of their internal representation. The networks offer efficient operation through highly sparse activity while matching performance with other similar spiking frameworks, and have high resilience against both external (e.g. sensory noise or collisions) and internal perturbations (e.g. synaptic noise and delays or neuron silencing) that such a network would be faced with when deployed by either an organism or an engineer. Overall, our work provides a novel mathematical account for spiking control through constraining free energy, providing both better insight into how brain networks might leverage their spiking substrate and a new route for implementing efficient control algorithms in neuromorphic hardware.