tension: A Python package for FORCE learning.

First-Order, Reduced and Controlled Error (FORCE) learning and its variants are widely used to train chaotic recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and outperform gradient methods on certain tasks. However, there is currently no standard software framework for FORCE learning. We present tension, an objec...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lu Bin Liu, Attila Losonczy, Zhenrui Liao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2022-12-01
Series:PLoS Computational Biology
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010722
Description
Summary:First-Order, Reduced and Controlled Error (FORCE) learning and its variants are widely used to train chaotic recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and outperform gradient methods on certain tasks. However, there is currently no standard software framework for FORCE learning. We present tension, an object-oriented, open-source Python package that implements a TensorFlow / Keras API for FORCE. We show how rate networks, spiking networks, and networks constrained by biological data can all be trained using a shared, easily extensible high-level API. With the same resources, our implementation outperforms a conventional RNN in loss and published FORCE implementations in runtime. Our work here makes FORCE training chaotic RNNs accessible and simple to iterate, and facilitates modeling of how behaviors of interest emerge from neural dynamics.
ISSN:1553-734X
1553-7358