Backpropamine: training self-modifying neural networks with differentiable neuromodulated plasticity

Understand

The impressive lifelong learning in animal brains is primarily enabled by plastic changes in synaptic connectivity.

• Importantly, these changes are not passive, but are actively controlled by neuromodulation, which is itself under the control of the brain.
• The resulting self-modifying abilities of the brain play an important role in learning and adaptation, and are a major basis for biological reinforcement learning.
• Here we show for the first time that artificial neural networks with such neuromodulated plasticity can be trained with gradient descent.