arXiv:2609.11989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Research on adaptive systems has traditionally focused on behavior (what organisms do) and mechanism (how their machinery works). This paper focuses on a third level, computation, which considers what adaptive systems must compute to survive and reproduce. It is proposed that adaptation has its own computational structure, comprising a small set of primitive operations common to all adaptive systems, regardless of their physical form. Six primitives, Arouse, Orient, Valence, Position, Boundary, and Attune, were selected using four criteria: necessity for existence, universality across independently evolved lineages, evolutionary conservation, and irreducibility. From this, two main implications follow. First, in biological systems, the primitives provide a substrate-neutral method for cross-species comparisons, reframing elaborative behaviors like attention, memory, and decision-making as combinations of these computations. Second, in artificial systems, the primitives offer a new way to view current challenges in machine intelligence, such as confabulation, prompt injection, distractibility, reward hacking, and catastrophic forgetting, suggesting that these issues may arise from a lack of these computations. Thus, for biological and artificial systems that persist, no specific physical substrate is necessary; rather, these primitives must be implemented if the systems are to be adaptive. What biology offers to inform machine intelligence, then, is not the brain's neural design but the computational functions it evolved to perform. The Computational Primitives Theory (CPT) presented here is a working hypothesis, intended for further refinement through discussion, empirical testing, and application.

arXiv:2609.13074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The maintenance of continuous variable information in working memory is thought to rely on persistent patterns of cortical activity. In delayed-estimation tasks, neural activity can form localized activity peaks, or ``bumps,'' whose positions track the remembered variable. Such activity is well described by continuous-attractor neural field models, but most existing models collapse cortical inhibition into a single homogeneous population. Here, we introduce a stochastic neural field model with distinct excitatory, parvalbumin-expressing (PV), and somatostatin-expressing (SST) populations to examine how inhibitory subtype structure shapes persistent activity. Using a Heaviside firing-rate approximation, we derive stationary bump solutions and reduce their linear stability to separate shifting and scaling modes. We show that population thresholds and inhibitory timescales determine both bump stability and the mechanism by which stability is lost, while inhibitory connection strengths and spatial scales substantially reshape the stable parameter region. In particular, broader SST connectivity promotes stable bump states. Finally, we derive an effective diffusion coefficient for noise-driven bump wandering and show that increasing the SST spatial footprint reduces the rate of memory diffusion. Together, these results demonstrate how inhibitory subtype structure can shape both the deterministic stability and stochastic precision of continuous-attractor memories.

arXiv:2511.08101v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper gives an in-depth theoretical analysis of the direction and speed selectivity properties of idealized models of the spatio-temporal receptive fields of simple cells and complex cells, based on the generalized Gaussian derivative model for visual receptive fields. According to this theory, the receptive fields are modelled as velocity-adapted affine Gaussian derivatives for different image velocities and different degrees of elongation. By probing such idealized receptive field models of visual neurons to moving sine waves with different angular frequencies and image velocities, we characterize the computational models to a structurally similar probing method as is used for characterizing the direction and speed selective properties of biological neurons. By comparison to results of neurophysiological measurements of direction and speed selectivity for biological neurons in the primary visual cortex, we find that our theoretical results are consistent with (i) velocity-tuned visual neurons that are sensitive to particular motion directions and speeds, and (ii) different visual neurons having broader vs. sharper direction and speed selective properties. Our theoretical results in combination with results from neurophysiological characterizations of motion-sensitive visual neurons are also consistent with a previously formulated hypothesis that the simple cells in the primary visual cortex ought to be covariant under local Galilean transformations, so as to enable processing of visual stimuli with different motion directions and speeds.

arXiv:2503.00612v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The basic problem of semantic compression is to minimize the length of a message while preserving its meaning. This differs from classical notions of compression in that the distortion is not measured directly at the level of bits, but rather in an abstract semantic space. In order to make this precise, we take inspiration from cognitive neuroscience and machine learning and model semantic space as a continuous Euclidean vector space. In such a space, stimuli like speech, images, or even ideas, are mapped to high-dimensional real vectors, and the location of these embeddings determines their meaning relative to other embeddings. This suggests that a natural metric for semantic similarity is just the Euclidean distance, which is what we use in this work. We map the optimization problem of determining the minimal-length, meaning-preserving message to a spin glass Hamiltonian and solve the resulting statistical mechanics problem using replica theory. We map out the replica symmetric phase diagram, identifying distinct phases of semantic compression: a first-order transition occurs between phases marked by the emergence of paraphrases, whereas a continuous crossover is seen from extractive to abstractive compression. We speculate on which features of the phase diagram are captured by replica symmetry, and which features change under replica symmetry breaking. We conclude by showing numerical simulations of compressions obtained by simulated annealing and greedy algorithms, and argue that while the problem of finding a meaning-preserving compression is computationally hard in the worst case, there exist efficient algorithms which achieve near optimal performance in the typical case.

arXiv:2607.03671v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Models of complex systems often have many parameters, yet are constrained by far fewer experimentally accessible observables; consequently, similar activity can emerge from coordinated parameter changes. We formalize these compatible parameter sets as \emph{viable parameter manifolds}: the inverse images of target dynamical features under a parameter-to-feature map. The relevant codimension is not the number of reported features, but the effective rank of that map at the target scale. Locally redundant features lower the effective codimension, while poor conditioning, high curvature, or regime mixing degrade learnability. We train conditional score-based diffusion models on simulated parameter--feature pairs and use them as amortized samplers of prior-weighted viable sets. In the Lorenz system, scalar trajectory statistics generate thin viable sheets, and a finite-tolerance conditioning localizes a transition-adjacent corridor. In the Izhikevich neuron model, four firing descriptors lie close to a nearly two-dimensional family of features, and the learned inverse images reveal distinct regular and irregular compensation geometries. In a deterministic ODE reduction of finite spiking networks, the same framework reveals excitatory--inhibitory compensation, timescale--coupling tradeoffs, and viable manifolds across 4--12 parameter dimensions. In this view, robustness, compensation, and hidden parameter dependencies are organized as inverse geometry, with diffusion models providing practical tools for sampling, visualizing, and interrogating that geometry.