@inproceedings{
s{\'a}godi2024back,
title={Back to the Continuous Attractor},
author={{\'A}bel S{\'a}godi and Guillermo Mart{\'\i}n-S{\'a}nchez and Piotr A Sokol and Il Memming Park},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=fvG6ZHrH0B}
}
Continuous attractors offer a unique class of solutions for storing continuous-valued variables in recurrent system states for indefinitely long time intervals.
Unfortunately, continuous attractors suffer from severe structural instability in general---they are destroyed by most infinitesimal changes of the dynamical law that defines them.
This fragility limits their utility especially in biological systems as their recurrent dynamics are subject to constant perturbations.
We observe that the bifurcations from continuous attractors in theoretical neuroscience models display various structurally stable forms.
Although their asymptotic behaviors to maintain memory are categorically distinct, their finite-time behaviors are similar.
We build on the persistent manifold theory to explain the commonalities between bifurcations from and approximations of continuous attractors.
Fast-slow decomposition analysis uncovers the existence of a persistent slow manifold that survives the seemingly destructive bifurcation, relating the flow within the manifold to the size of the perturbation. Moreover, this allows the bounding of the memory error of these approximations of continuous attractors.
Finally, we train recurrent neural networks on analog memory tasks to support the appearance of these systems as solutions and their generalization capabilities.
Therefore, we conclude that continuous attractors are functionally robust and remain useful as a universal analogy for understanding analog memory.
Back to the Continuous Attractor
Ábel Ságodi Guillermo Martín-Sánchez Piotr A Sokol Il Memming Park