Self-Motivated Growing Neural Network for Adaptive Architecture via Local Structural Plasticity

Control policies in deep reinforcement learning are often implemented with fixed-capacity multilayer perceptrons trained by backpropagation, which lack structural plasticity and depend on global error signals. This paper introduces the Self-Motivated Growing Neural Network (SMGrNN), a controller whose topology evolves online through a local Structural Plasticity Module (SPM). The SPM monitors neuron activations and edge-wise weight update statistics over short temporal windows and uses these signals to trigger neuron insertion and pruning, while synaptic weights are updated by a standard gradient-based optimizer. This allows network capacity to be regulated during learning without manual architectural tuning. SMGrNN is evaluated on control benchmarks via policy distillation. Compared with multilayer perceptron baselines, it achieves similar or higher returns, lower variance, and task-appropriate network sizes. Ablation studies with growth disabled and growth-only variants isolate the role of structural plasticity, showing that adaptive topology improves reward stability. The local and modular design of SPM enables future integration of a Hebbian plasticity module and spike-timing-dependent plasticity, so that SMGrNN can support both artificial and spiking neural implementations driven by local rules.

A Categorical Analysis of Large Language Models and Why LLMs Circumvent the Symbol Grounding Problem

This paper presents a formal, categorical framework for analysing how humans and large language models (LLMs) transform content into truth-evaluated propositions about a state space of possible worlds W , in order to argue that LLMs do not solve but circumvent the symbol grounding problem.

Category-Theoretical and Topos-Theoretical Frameworks in Machine Learning: A Survey

In this survey, we provide an overview of category theory-derived machine learning from four mainstream perspectives: gradient-based learning, probability-based learning, invariance and equivalence-based learning, and topos-based learning. For the first three topics, we primarily review research in the past five years, updating and expanding on the previous survey by Shiebler et al.. The fourth topic, which delves into higher category theory, particularly topos theory, is surveyed for the first time in this paper. In certain machine learning methods, the compositionality of functors plays a vital role, prompting the development of specific categorical frameworks. However, when considering how the global properties of a network reflect in local structures and how geometric properties are expressed with logic, the topos structure becomes particularly significant and profound.