Dynamic Neural Response Tuning

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have gained widespread applications across various areas in recent years. The ANN design was initially inspired by principles of biology. The biological neural network's fundamental response process comprises information transmission and aggregation. The information transmission in biological neurons is often achieved by triggering action potentials that propagate through axons. ANNs utilize activation mechanisms to simulate such biological behavior. However, previous studies have only considered static response conditions, while the biological neuron's response conditions are typically dynamic, depending on multiple factors such as neuronal properties and the real-time environment. Therefore, the dynamic response conditions of biological neurons could help improve the static ones of existing activations in ANNs. Additionally, the biological neuron's aggregated response exhibits high specificity for different categories, allowing the nervous system to differentiate and identify objects. Inspired by these biological patterns, we propose a novel Dynamic Neural Response Tuning (DNRT) mechanism, which aligns the response patterns of ANNs with those of biological neurons. DNRT comprises Response-Adaptive Activation (RAA) and Aggregated Response Regularization (ARR), mimicking the biological neuron's information transmission and aggregation behaviors. RAA dynamically adjusts the response condition based on the characteristics and strength of the input signal. ARR is devised to enhance the network's ability to learn category specificity by imposing constraints on the network's response distribution. Extensive experimental studies indicate that the proposed DNRT is highly interpretable, applicable to various mainstream network architectures, and can achieve remarkable performance compared with existing neural response mechanisms in multiple tasks and domains. Code is available at https://github.com/horrible-dong/DNRT.