Daily Papers

The brain solves the credit assignment problem remarkably well. For credit to be assigned across neural networks they must, in principle, wait for specific neural computations to finish. How the brain deals with this inherent locking problem has remained unclear. Deep learning methods suffer from similar locking constraints both on the forward and feedback phase. Recently, decoupled neural interfaces (DNIs) were introduced as a solution to the forward and feedback locking problems in deep networks. Here we propose that a specialised brain region, the cerebellum, helps the cerebral cortex solve similar locking problems akin to DNIs. To demonstrate the potential of this framework we introduce a systems-level model in which a recurrent cortical network receives online temporal feedback predictions from a cerebellar module. We test this cortico-cerebellar recurrent neural network (ccRNN) model on a number of sensorimotor (line and digit drawing) and cognitive tasks (pattern recognition and caption generation) that have been shown to be cerebellar-dependent. In all tasks, we observe that ccRNNs facilitates learning while reducing ataxia-like behaviours, consistent with classical experimental observations. Moreover, our model also explains recent behavioural and neuronal observations while making several testable predictions across multiple levels. Overall, our work offers a novel perspective on the cerebellum as a brain-wide decoupling machine for efficient credit assignment and opens a new avenue between deep learning and neuroscience.

Enhancing the spatial perception capabilities of mobile robots is crucial for achieving embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). Although significant progress has been made in simulated environments, directly transferring these capabilities to real-world scenarios often results in severe hallucination phenomena, causing robots to lose effective spatial awareness. To address this issue, we propose BrainNav, a bio-inspired spatial cognitive navigation framework inspired by biological spatial cognition theories and cognitive map theory. BrainNav integrates dual-map (coordinate map and topological map) and dual-orientation (relative orientation and absolute orientation) strategies, enabling real-time navigation through dynamic scene capture and path planning. Its five core modules-Hippocampal Memory Hub, Visual Cortex Perception Engine, Parietal Spatial Constructor, Prefrontal Decision Center, and Cerebellar Motion Execution Unit-mimic biological cognitive functions to reduce spatial hallucinations and enhance adaptability. Validated in a zero-shot real-world lab environment using the Limo Pro robot, BrainNav, compatible with GPT-4, outperforms existing State-of-the-Art (SOTA) Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) methods without fine-tuning.

We present RoboMemory, a brain-inspired multi-memory framework for lifelong learning in physical embodied systems, addressing critical challenges in real-world environments: continuous learning, multi-module memory latency, task correlation capture, and infinite-loop mitigation in closed-loop planning. Grounded in cognitive neuroscience, it integrates four core modules: the Information Preprocessor (thalamus-like), the Lifelong Embodied Memory System (hippocampus-like), the Closed-Loop Planning Module (prefrontal lobe-like), and the Low-Level Executer (cerebellum-like) to enable long-term planning and cumulative learning. The Lifelong Embodied Memory System, central to the framework, alleviates inference speed issues in complex memory frameworks via parallelized updates/retrieval across Spatial, Temporal, Episodic, and Semantic submodules. It incorporates a dynamic Knowledge Graph (KG) and consistent architectural design to enhance memory consistency and scalability. Evaluations on EmbodiedBench show RoboMemory outperforms the open-source baseline (Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Ins) by 25% in average success rate and surpasses the closed-source State-of-the-Art (SOTA) (Claude3.5-Sonnet) by 5%, establishing new SOTA. Ablation studies validate key components (critic, spatial memory, long-term memory), while real-world deployment confirms its lifelong learning capability with significantly improved success rates across repeated tasks. RoboMemory alleviates high latency challenges with scalability, serving as a foundational reference for integrating multi-modal memory systems in physical robots.

Developing a general robot manipulation system capable of performing a wide range of tasks in complex, dynamic, and unstructured real-world environments has long been a challenging task. It is widely recognized that achieving human-like efficiency and robustness manipulation requires the robotic brain to integrate a comprehensive set of functions, such as task planning, policy generation, anomaly monitoring and handling, and long-term memory, achieving high-efficiency operation across all functions. Vision-Language Models (VLMs), pretrained on massive multimodal data, have acquired rich world knowledge, exhibiting exceptional scene understanding and multimodal reasoning capabilities. However, existing methods typically focus on realizing only a single function or a subset of functions within the robotic brain, without integrating them into a unified cognitive architecture. Inspired by a divide-and-conquer strategy and the architecture of the human brain, we propose FrankenBot, a VLM-driven, brain-morphic robotic manipulation framework that achieves both comprehensive functionality and high operational efficiency. Our framework includes a suite of components, decoupling a part of key functions from frequent VLM calls, striking an optimal balance between functional completeness and system efficiency. Specifically, we map task planning, policy generation, memory management, and low-level interfacing to the cortex, cerebellum, temporal lobe-hippocampus complex, and brainstem, respectively, and design efficient coordination mechanisms for the modules. We conducted comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic environments, demonstrating that our method offers significant advantages in anomaly detection and handling, long-term memory, operational efficiency, and stability -- all without requiring any fine-tuning or retraining.

Advancements in LLMs have recently unveiled challenges tied to computational efficiency and continual scalability due to their requirements of huge parameters, making the applications and evolution of these models on devices with limited computation resources and scenarios requiring various abilities increasingly cumbersome. Inspired by modularity within the human brain, there is a growing tendency to decompose LLMs into numerous functional modules, allowing for inference with part of modules and dynamic assembly of modules to tackle complex tasks, such as mixture-of-experts. To highlight the inherent efficiency and composability of the modular approach, we coin the term brick to represent each functional module, designating the modularized structure as configurable foundation models. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive overview and investigation of the construction, utilization, and limitation of configurable foundation models. We first formalize modules into emergent bricks - functional neuron partitions that emerge during the pre-training phase, and customized bricks - bricks constructed via additional post-training to improve the capabilities and knowledge of LLMs. Based on diverse functional bricks, we further present four brick-oriented operations: retrieval and routing, merging, updating, and growing. These operations allow for dynamic configuration of LLMs based on instructions to handle complex tasks. To verify our perspective, we conduct an empirical analysis on widely-used LLMs. We find that the FFN layers follow modular patterns with functional specialization of neurons and functional neuron partitions. Finally, we highlight several open issues and directions for future research. Overall, this paper aims to offer a fresh modular perspective on existing LLM research and inspire the future creation of more efficient and scalable foundational models.

We introduce a novel system for human-to-robot trajectory transfer that enables robots to manipulate objects by learning from human demonstration videos. The system consists of four modules. The first module is a data collection module that is designed to collect human demonstration videos from the point of view of a robot using an AR headset. The second module is a video understanding module that detects objects and extracts 3D human-hand trajectories from demonstration videos. The third module transfers a human-hand trajectory into a reference trajectory of a robot end-effector in 3D space. The last module utilizes a trajectory optimization algorithm to solve a trajectory in the robot configuration space that can follow the end-effector trajectory transferred from the human demonstration. Consequently, these modules enable a robot to watch a human demonstration video once and then repeat the same mobile manipulation task in different environments, even when objects are placed differently from the demonstrations. Experiments of different manipulation tasks are conducted on a mobile manipulator to verify the effectiveness of our system

NeMo (Neural Modules) is a Python framework-agnostic toolkit for creating AI applications through re-usability, abstraction, and composition. NeMo is built around neural modules, conceptual blocks of neural networks that take typed inputs and produce typed outputs. Such modules typically represent data layers, encoders, decoders, language models, loss functions, or methods of combining activations. NeMo makes it easy to combine and re-use these building blocks while providing a level of semantic correctness checking via its neural type system. The toolkit comes with extendable collections of pre-built modules for automatic speech recognition and natural language processing. Furthermore, NeMo provides built-in support for distributed training and mixed precision on latest NVIDIA GPUs. NeMo is open-source https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo

Neural Module Networks, originally proposed for the task of visual question answering, are a class of neural network architectures that involve human-specified neural modules, each designed for a specific form of reasoning. In current formulations of such networks only the parameters of the neural modules and/or the order of their execution is learned. In this work, we further expand this approach and also learn the underlying internal structure of modules in terms of the ordering and combination of simple and elementary arithmetic operators. Our results show that one is indeed able to simultaneously learn both internal module structure and module sequencing without extra supervisory signals for module execution sequencing. With this approach, we report performance comparable to models using hand-designed modules.

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable neural interaction by decoding brain activity for external communication. Motor imagery (MI) decoding has received significant attention due to its intuitive mechanism. However, most existing models rely on single-stream architectures and overlook the multi-view nature of EEG signals, leading to limited performance and generalization. We propose a multi-view contrastive network (MVCNet), a dual-branch architecture that parallelly integrates CNN and Transformer models to capture both local spatial-temporal features and global temporal dependencies. To enhance the informativeness of training data, MVCNet incorporates a unified augmentation pipeline across time, frequency, and spatial domains. Two contrastive modules are further introduced: a cross-view contrastive module that enforces consistency of original and augmented views, and a cross-model contrastive module that aligns features extracted from both branches. Final representations are fused and jointly optimized by contrastive and classification losses. Experiments on five public MI datasets across three scenarios demonstrate that MVCNet consistently outperforms seven state-of-the-art MI decoding networks, highlighting its effectiveness and generalization ability. MVCNet provides a robust solution for MI decoding by integrating multi-view information and dual-branch modeling, contributing to the development of more reliable BCI systems.

Automated brain structure segmentation is important to many clinical quantitative analysis and diagnoses. In this work, we introduce MixNet, a 2D semantic-wise deep convolutional neural network to segment brain structure in multi-modality MRI images. The network is composed of our modified deep residual learning units. In the unit, we replace the traditional convolution layer with the dilated convolutional layer, which avoids the use of pooling layers and deconvolutional layers, reducing the number of network parameters. Final predictions are made by aggregating information from multiple scales and modalities. A pyramid pooling module is used to capture spatial information of the anatomical structures at the output end. In addition, we test three architectures (MixNetv1, MixNetv2 and MixNetv3) which fuse the modalities differently to see the effect on the results. Our network achieves the state-of-the-art performance. MixNetv2 was submitted to the MRBrainS challenge at MICCAI 2018 and won the 3rd place in the 3-label task. On the MRBrainS2018 dataset, which includes subjects with a variety of pathologies, the overall DSC (Dice Coefficient) of 84.7% (gray matter), 87.3% (white matter) and 83.4% (cerebrospinal fluid) were obtained with only 7 subjects as training data.

We present a simple mathematical model for the mammalian low visual pathway, taking into account its key elements: retina, lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), primary visual cortex (V1). The analogies between the cortical level of the visual system and the structure of popular CNNs, used in image classification tasks, suggests the introduction of an additional preliminary convolutional module inspired to precortical neuronal circuits to improve robustness with respect to global light intensity and contrast variations in the input images. We validate our hypothesis on the popular databases MNIST, FashionMNIST and SVHN, obtaining significantly more robust CNNs with respect to these variations, once such extra module is added.

We present a model inspired by the Global Workspace Theory that integrates specialized modules to perform a sequential reasoning task. A controller selectively routes information between modules through the workspace using a gating mechanism. This approach allows the model to chain operations by iteratively broadcasting information between specialized domains, mimicking System-2 reasoning. We evaluate the model's performance on a simple addition task, where two addends must be summed. The task can be solved by routing information sequentially through an Input module, an Increment module (multiple times), and finally an Output module. We consider two implementations of this system with increasing complexity. First, using hand-designed modules operating on one-hot digit representations, the controller (a LSTM recurrent network) learns to select the appropriate modules (input, increment, output) in the appropriate sequence. Second, we replace the hand-designed modules with learned representation modules for MNIST images and an increment module trained on the task objectives; here again, the controller learns the appropriate sequential module selection to solve the task. Finally, we show that the Global Workspace model, while having fewer parameters, outperforms LSTMs and Transformers when tested on unseen addition operations (both interpolations and extrapolations of addition operations seen during training). Our results highlight the potential of architectures inspired by the Global Workspace Theory to enhance deep learning's reasoning capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable prediction performance for a growing array of tasks. However, their rapid proliferation and increasing opaqueness have created a growing need for interpretability. Here, we ask whether we can automatically obtain natural language explanations for black box text modules. A "text module" is any function that maps text to a scalar continuous value, such as a submodule within an LLM or a fitted model of a brain region. "Black box" indicates that we only have access to the module's inputs/outputs. We introduce Summarize and Score (SASC), a method that takes in a text module and returns a natural language explanation of the module's selectivity along with a score for how reliable the explanation is. We study SASC in 3 contexts. First, we evaluate SASC on synthetic modules and find that it often recovers ground truth explanations. Second, we use SASC to explain modules found within a pre-trained BERT model, enabling inspection of the model's internals. Finally, we show that SASC can generate explanations for the response of individual fMRI voxels to language stimuli, with potential applications to fine-grained brain mapping. All code for using SASC and reproducing results is made available on Github.

Recent advances in large-scale machine learning have produced high-capacity foundation models capable of adapting to a broad array of downstream tasks. While such models hold great promise for robotics, the prevailing paradigm still portrays robots as single, autonomous decision-makers, performing tasks like manipulation and navigation, with limited human involvement. However, a large class of real-world robotic systems, including wearable robotics (e.g., prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons), teleoperation, and neural interfaces, are semiautonomous, and require ongoing interactive coordination with human partners, challenging single-agent assumptions. In this position paper, we argue that robot foundation models must evolve to an interactive multi-agent perspective in order to handle the complexities of real-time human-robot co-adaptation. We propose a generalizable, neuroscience-inspired architecture encompassing four modules: (1) a multimodal sensing module informed by sensorimotor integration principles, (2) an ad-hoc teamwork model reminiscent of joint-action frameworks in cognitive science, (3) a predictive world belief model grounded in internal model theories of motor control, and (4) a memory/feedback mechanism that echoes concepts of Hebbian and reinforcement-based plasticity. Although illustrated through the lens of cyborg systems, where wearable devices and human physiology are inseparably intertwined, the proposed framework is broadly applicable to robots operating in semi-autonomous or interactive contexts. By moving beyond single-agent designs, our position emphasizes how foundation models in robotics can achieve a more robust, personalized, and anticipatory level of performance.

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals, known for convenient non-invasive acquisition but low signal-to-noise ratio, have recently gained substantial attention due to the potential to decode natural images. This paper presents a self-supervised framework to demonstrate the feasibility of learning image representations from EEG signals, particularly for object recognition. The framework utilizes image and EEG encoders to extract features from paired image stimuli and EEG responses. Contrastive learning aligns these two modalities by constraining their similarity. With the framework, we attain significantly above-chance results on a comprehensive EEG-image dataset, achieving a top-1 accuracy of 15.6% and a top-5 accuracy of 42.8% in challenging 200-way zero-shot tasks. Moreover, we perform extensive experiments to explore the biological plausibility by resolving the temporal, spatial, spectral, and semantic aspects of EEG signals. Besides, we introduce attention modules to capture spatial correlations, providing implicit evidence of the brain activity perceived from EEG data. These findings yield valuable insights for neural decoding and brain-computer interfaces in real-world scenarios. The code will be released on https://github.com/eeyhsong/NICE-EEG.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped our world with significant advancements in science, engineering, and society through applications ranging from scientific discoveries and medical diagnostics to Chatbots. Despite their ubiquity and utility, the underlying mechanisms of LLM remain concealed within billions of parameters and complex structures, making their inner architecture and cognitive processes challenging to comprehend. We address this gap by adopting approaches to understanding emerging cognition in biology and developing a network-based framework that links cognitive skills, LLM architectures, and datasets, ushering in a paradigm shift in foundation model analysis. The skill distribution in the module communities demonstrates that while LLMs do not strictly parallel the focalized specialization observed in specific biological systems, they exhibit unique communities of modules whose emergent skill patterns partially mirror the distributed yet interconnected cognitive organization seen in avian and small mammalian brains. Our numerical results highlight a key divergence from biological systems to LLMs, where skill acquisition benefits substantially from dynamic, cross-regional interactions and neural plasticity. By integrating cognitive science principles with machine learning, our framework provides new insights into LLM interpretability and suggests that effective fine-tuning strategies should leverage distributed learning dynamics rather than rigid modular interventions.

Despite rapid progress in multimodal foundation models, embodied intelligence community still lacks a unified, physically grounded foundation model that integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within real-world spatial-temporal dynamics. We introduce RynnBrain, an open-source spatiotemporal foundation model for embodied intelligence. RynnBrain strengthens four core capabilities in a unified framework: comprehensive egocentric understanding, diverse spatiotemporal localization, physically grounded reasoning, and physics-aware planning. The RynnBrain family comprises three foundation model scales (2B, 8B, and 30B-A3B MoE) and four post-trained variants tailored for downstream embodied tasks (i.e., RynnBrain-Nav, RynnBrain-Plan, and RynnBrain-VLA) or complex spatial reasoning tasks (i.e., RynnBrain-CoP). In terms of extensive evaluations on 20 embodied benchmarks and 8 general vision understanding benchmarks, our RynnBrain foundation models largely outperform existing embodied foundation models by a significant margin. The post-trained model suite further substantiates two key potentials of the RynnBrain foundation model: (i) enabling physically grounded reasoning and planning, and (ii) serving as a strong pretrained backbone that can be efficiently adapted to diverse embodied tasks.

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) transform spontaneous/evoked neural activity into control commands for external communication. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) remain the mainstream backbone for EEG decoding, their inherently short receptive field makes it difficult to capture long-range temporal dependencies and global inter-channel relationships. Recent CNN-Transformer (Conformers) hybrids partially address this issue, but most adopt a serial design, resulting in suboptimal integration of local and global features, and often overlook explicit channel-wise modeling. To address these limitations, we propose DBConformer, a dual-branch convolutional Transformer network tailored for EEG decoding. It integrates a temporal Conformer to model long-range temporal dependencies and a spatial Conformer to extract inter-channel interactions, capturing both temporal dynamics and spatial patterns in EEG signals. A lightweight channel attention module further refines spatial representations by assigning data-driven importance to EEG channels. Extensive experiments on five motor imagery (MI) datasets and two seizure detection datasets under three evaluation settings demonstrate that DBConformer consistently outperforms 10 competitive baseline models, with over eight times fewer parameters than the high-capacity EEG Conformer baseline. Further, the visualization results confirm that the features extracted by DBConformer are physiologically interpretable and aligned with sensorimotor priors in MI. The superior performance and interpretability of DBConformer make it reliable for robust and explainable EEG decoding. Code is publicized at https://github.com/wzwvv/DBConformer.

Mapping behavioral actions to neural activity is a fundamental goal of neuroscience. As our ability to record large neural and behavioral data increases, there is growing interest in modeling neural dynamics during adaptive behaviors to probe neural representations. In particular, neural latent embeddings can reveal underlying correlates of behavior, yet, we lack non-linear techniques that can explicitly and flexibly leverage joint behavior and neural data. Here, we fill this gap with a novel method, CEBRA, that jointly uses behavioral and neural data in a hypothesis- or discovery-driven manner to produce consistent, high-performance latent spaces. We validate its accuracy and demonstrate our tool's utility for both calcium and electrophysiology datasets, across sensory and motor tasks, and in simple or complex behaviors across species. It allows for single and multi-session datasets to be leveraged for hypothesis testing or can be used label-free. Lastly, we show that CEBRA can be used for the mapping of space, uncovering complex kinematic features, and rapid, high-accuracy decoding of natural movies from visual cortex.

The parcellation of Cranial Nerves (CNs) serves as a crucial quantitative methodology for evaluating the morphological characteristics and anatomical pathways of specific CNs. Multi-modal CNs parcellation networks have achieved promising segmentation performance, which combine structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and diffusion MRI. However, insufficient exploration of diffusion MRI information has led to low performance of existing multi-modal fusion. In this work, we propose a tractography-guided Dual-label Collaborative Learning Network (DCLNet) for multi-modal CNs parcellation. The key contribution of our DCLNet is the introduction of coarse labels of CNs obtained from fiber tractography through CN atlas, and collaborative learning with precise labels annotated by experts. Meanwhile, we introduce a Modality-adaptive Encoder Module (MEM) to achieve soft information swapping between structural MRI and diffusion MRI. Extensive experiments conducted on the publicly available Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset demonstrate performance improvements compared to single-label network. This systematic validation underscores the effectiveness of dual-label strategies in addressing inherent ambiguities in CNs parcellation tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance on a wide variety of tasks, but they often struggle with tasks that require multi-step reasoning or goal-directed planning. To address this, we take inspiration from the human brain, in which planning is accomplished via the recurrent interaction of specialized modules in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). These modules perform functions such as conflict monitoring, state prediction, state evaluation, task decomposition, and task coordination. We find that LLMs are sometimes capable of carrying out these functions in isolation, but struggle to autonomously coordinate them in the service of a goal. Therefore, we propose a black box architecture with multiple LLM-based (GPT-4) modules. The architecture improves planning through the interaction of specialized PFC-inspired modules that break down a larger problem into multiple brief automated calls to the LLM. We evaluate the combined architecture on two challenging planning tasks -- graph traversal and Tower of Hanoi -- finding that it yields significant improvements over standard LLM methods (e.g., zero-shot prompting or in-context learning). These results demonstrate the benefit of utilizing knowledge from cognitive neuroscience to improve planning in LLMs.

In this study, we present a novel paradigm for industrial robotic embodied agents, encapsulating an 'agent as cerebrum, controller as cerebellum' architecture. Our approach harnesses the power of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) within an agent framework known as AeroAgent, tailored for drone technology in industrial settings. To facilitate seamless integration with robotic systems, we introduce ROSchain, a bespoke linkage framework connecting LMM-based agents to the Robot Operating System (ROS). We report findings from extensive empirical research, including simulated experiments on the Airgen and real-world case study, particularly in individual search and rescue operations. The results demonstrate AeroAgent's superior performance in comparison to existing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based agents, highlighting the advantages of the embodied LMM in complex, real-world scenarios.

Invasive brain-computer interfaces have garnered significant attention due to their high performance. The current intracranial stereoElectroEncephaloGraphy (sEEG) foundation models typically build univariate representations based on a single channel. Some of them further use Transformer to model the relationship among channels. However, due to the locality and specificity of brain computation, their performance on more difficult tasks, e.g., speech decoding, which demands intricate processing in specific brain regions, is yet to be fully investigated. We hypothesize that building multi-variate representations within certain brain regions can better capture the specific neural processing. To explore this hypothesis, we collect a well-annotated Chinese word-reading sEEG dataset, targeting language-related brain networks, over 12 subjects. Leveraging this benchmark dataset, we developed the Du-IN model that can extract contextual embeddings from specific brain regions through discrete codebook-guided mask modeling. Our model achieves SOTA performance on the downstream 61-word classification task, surpassing all baseline models. Model comparison and ablation analysis reveal that our design choices, including (i) multi-variate representation by fusing channels in vSMC and STG regions and (ii) self-supervision by discrete codebook-guided mask modeling, significantly contribute to these performances. Collectively, our approach, inspired by neuroscience findings, capitalizing on multi-variate neural representation from specific brain regions, is suitable for invasive brain modeling. It marks a promising neuro-inspired AI approach in BCI.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-level or even superior language abilities, effectively modeling syntactic structures, yet the specific computational modules responsible remain unclear. A key question is whether LLM behavioral capabilities stem from mechanisms akin to those in the human brain. To address these questions, we introduce the Hierarchical Frequency Tagging Probe (HFTP), a tool that utilizes frequency-domain analysis to identify neuron-wise components of LLMs (e.g., individual Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neurons) and cortical regions (via intracranial recordings) encoding syntactic structures. Our results show that models such as GPT-2, Gemma, Gemma 2, Llama 2, Llama 3.1, and GLM-4 process syntax in analogous layers, while the human brain relies on distinct cortical regions for different syntactic levels. Representational similarity analysis reveals a stronger alignment between LLM representations and the left hemisphere of the brain (dominant in language processing). Notably, upgraded models exhibit divergent trends: Gemma 2 shows greater brain similarity than Gemma, while Llama 3.1 shows less alignment with the brain compared to Llama 2. These findings offer new insights into the interpretability of LLM behavioral improvements, raising questions about whether these advancements are driven by human-like or non-human-like mechanisms, and establish HFTP as a valuable tool bridging computational linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. This project is available at https://github.com/LilTiger/HFTP.

Modular neural architectures are gaining increasing attention due to their powerful capability for generalization and sample-efficient adaptation to new domains. However, training modular models, particularly in the early stages, poses challenges due to the optimization difficulties arising from their intrinsic sparse connectivity. Leveraging the knowledge from monolithic models, using techniques such as knowledge distillation, is likely to facilitate the training of modular models and enable them to integrate knowledge from multiple models pretrained on diverse sources. Nevertheless, conventional knowledge distillation approaches are not tailored to modular models and can fail when directly applied due to the unique architectures and the enormous number of parameters involved. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a general module-to-module knowledge distillation (m2mKD) method for transferring knowledge between modules. Our approach involves teacher modules split from a pretrained monolithic model, and student modules of a modular model. m2mKD separately combines these modules with a shared meta model and encourages the student module to mimic the behaviour of the teacher module. We evaluate the effectiveness of m2mKD on two distinct modular neural architectures: Neural Attentive Circuits (NACs) and Vision Mixture-of-Experts (V-MoE). By applying m2mKD to NACs, we achieve significant improvements in IID accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet (up to 5.6%) and OOD robustness on Tiny-ImageNet-R (up to 4.2%). On average, we observe a 1% gain in both ImageNet and ImageNet-R. The V-MoE-Base model trained using m2mKD also achieves 3.5% higher accuracy than end-to-end training on ImageNet. The experimental results demonstrate that our method offers a promising solution for connecting modular networks with pretrained monolithic models. Code is available at https://github.com/kamanphoebe/m2mKD.