Brain topology improved spiking neural network for efficient reinforcement learning of continuous control

The brain topology highly reflects the complex cognitive functions of the biological brain after million-years of evolution. Learning from these biological topologies is a smarter and easier way to achieve brain-like intelligence with features of efficiency, robustness, and flexibility. Here we proposed a brain topology-improved spiking neural network (BT-SNN) for efficient reinforcement learning. First, hundreds of biological topologies are generated and selected as subsets of the Allen mouse brain topology with the help of the Tanimoto hierarchical clustering algorithm, which has been widely used in analyzing key features of the brain connectome. Second, a few biological constraints are used to filter out three key topology candidates, including but not limited to the proportion of node functions (e.g., sensation, memory, and motor types) and network sparsity. Third, the network topology is integrated with the hybrid numerical solver-improved leaky-integrated and fire neurons. Fourth, the algorithm is then tuned with an evolutionary algorithm named adaptive random search instead of backpropagation to guide synaptic modifications without affecting raw key features of the topology. Fifth, under the test of four animal-survival-like RL tasks (i.e., dynamic controlling in Mujoco), the BT-SNN can achieve higher scores than not only counterpart SNN using random topology but also some classical ANNs (i.e., long-short-term memory and multi-layer perception). This result indicates that the research effort of incorporating biological topology and evolutionary learning rules has much in store for the future.