Context-sensitive neocortical neurons transform the effectiveness and efficiency of neural information processing

Deep learning (DL) can arguably achieve superhuman performance in many real-world domains but at the cost of unsustainably high energy levels. We hypothesise that the fundamental problem lies in its intrinsic dependence on simplified 'point' neurons that inherently maximise the transmission of information irrespective of whether the information is relevant to other neurons or for the long-term benefit of the whole network. This leads to unnecessary neural firing and conflicting messages to higher perceptual layers, which makes DL energy inefficient and hard to train. We can circumvent this limitation of DL by mimicking a context-sensitive two-point neocortical neuron that at one point receives input from diverse neurons as context to amplify and suppress the transmission of coherent and incoherent feedforward (FF) information received at the other point, respectively. We show that a deep network composed of such local processors seeks to maximise agreement between the active neurons, thus restricting the transmission of conflicting information to higher levels and reducing the amount of neural activity required to process large amounts of heterogeneous real-world data. As shown to be far more effective and efficient than current forms of DL, this two-point neuron study offers a step-change in transforming the cellular foundations of deep network architectures.