Biologically plausible learning in neural networks: a lesson from bacterial chemotaxis

Learning processes in the brain are usually associated with plastic changes made to optimize the strength of connections between neurons. Although many details related to biophysical mechanisms of synaptic plasticity have been discovered, it is unclear how the concurrent performance of adaptive modifications in a huge number of spatial locations is organized to minimize a given objective function. Since direct experimental observation of even a relatively small subset of such changes is not feasible, computational modeling is an indispensable investigation tool for solving this problem. However, the conventional method of error back-propagation (EBP) employed for optimizing synaptic weights in artificial neural networks is not biologically plausible. This study based on computational experiments demonstrated that such optimization can be performed rather efficiently using the same general method that bacteria employ for moving closer to an attractant or away from a repellent. With regard to neural network optimization, this method consists of regulating the probability of an abrupt change in the direction of synaptic weight modification according to the temporal gradient of the objective function. Neural networks utilizing this method (regulation of modification probability, RMP) can be viewed as analogous to swimming in the multidimensional space of their parameters in the flow of biochemical agents carrying information about the optimality criterion. The efficiency of RMP is comparable to that of EBP, while RMP has several important advantages. Since the biological plausibility of RMP is beyond a reasonable doubt, the RMP concept provides a constructive framework for the experimental analysis of learning in natural neural networks.