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Re:TopoNets: High performing vision and language models with... by mayukhdeb on Friday January 31, 2025 @09:43AM (#42888146)
It is indeed brain-like in a functional way. Topographic structure is what enables the brain to have low dimensionality and metabolic efficiency. We find that inducing such structure in neural nets made them have significantly lower dimensionality and also more parameter efficient (After training, we could take advantage of the structure to remove ~80% of the weights in topographic layers without sacrificing performance)
Re:TopoNets: High performing vision and language models with... by devmor on Saturday February 01, 2025 @02:16AM (#42896484)
>After training, we could take advantage of the structure to remove ~80% of the weights in topographic layers without sacrificing performance

This is really interesting to me. Is it that the structure clustered the neurons in such a way that they didn't need to be weighted because their function were grouped by similar black box properties?

Re:TopoNets: High performing vision and language models with... by mayukhdeb on Saturday February 01, 2025 @08:54AM (#42898282)
> Is it that the structure clustered the neurons in such a way that they didn't need to be weighted

Yep. Because of the structure, we did not have to compute the output of each weight column and simply copied the outputs of nearby weight columns whose outputs were computed.

Re:TopoNets: High performing vision and language models with... by devmor on Monday February 03, 2025 @11:20AM (#42919794)
That is really cool and deserves the descriptor "brain-like", thank you for answering my questions!
Re:TopoNets: High performing vision and language models with... by mayukhdeb on Thursday February 06, 2025 @12:28PM (#42964504)
Thanks for the kind words! Happy to know that there are people out there who find this stuff just as interesting as I do.