RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Presynaptic Stochasticity Improves Energy Efficiency and Alleviates the Stability-Plasticity Dilemma
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.05.05.442708
DO 10.1101/2021.05.05.442708
A1 Simon Schug
A1 Frederik Benzing
A1 Angelika Steger
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/09/13/2021.05.05.442708.abstract
AB When an action potential arrives at a synapse there is a large probability that no neurotransmitter is released. Surprisingly, simple computational models suggest that these synaptic failures enable information processing at lower metabolic costs. However, these models only consider information transmission at single synapses ignoring the remainder of the neural network as well as its overall computational goal. Here, we investigate how synaptic failures affect the energy efficiency of models of entire neural networks that solve a goal-driven task. We find that presynaptic stochasticity and plasticity improve energy efficiency and show that the network allocates most energy to a sparse subset of important synapses. We demonstrate that stabilising these synapses helps to alleviate the stability-plasticity dilemma, thus connecting a presynaptic notion of importance to a computational role in lifelong learning. Overall, our findings present a set of hypotheses for how presynaptic plasticity and stochasticity contribute to sparsity, energy efficiency and improved trade-offs in the stability-plasticity dilemma.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.