The geometry of abstraction in the cortex, in the hippocampus and in deep networks

by Stefano Fusi (Columbia University)

Monday 25 Jun 2018, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi)

The cognitive process of abstraction allows us to create new concepts that are dissociated from the numerous instances that define them. This process is fundamentally important as it permits to generalize easily to new situations. One way to represent an abstract variable is to completely discard the information about specific instances. Unfortunately, this encoding strategy would allow to represent only one abstract variable. Here we show that it is possible to construct neural representations that allow to encode multiple abstract variables.