[mayukhdeb]

It is indeed brain-like in a functional way. Topographic structure is what enables the brain to have low dimensionality and metabolic efficiency. We find that inducing such structure in neural nets made them have significantly lower dimensionality and also more parameter efficient (After training, we could take advantage of the structure to remove ~80% of the weights in topographic layers without sacrificing performance)

[devmor]

>After training, we could take advantage of the structure to remove ~80% of the weights in topographic layers without sacrificing performance

This is really interesting to me. Is it that the structure clustered the neurons in such a way that they didn't need to be weighted because their function were grouped by similar black box properties?

[mayukhdeb]

> Is it that the structure clustered the neurons in such a way that they didn't need to be weighted

Yep. Because of the structure, we did not have to compute the output of each weight column and simply copied the outputs of nearby weight columns whose outputs were computed.