AI and the World's Hard Problems · Life sciences · arXiv · 2026-10-20
Disentanglement with Biological Constraints: A Theory of Functional Cell Types
The authors mathematically prove that nonnegativity and energy efficiency in neuronal activity and weights promote disentangled representations, where neurons respond to single task factors. They show this effect across several tasks and architectures, including variational autoencoders. The theory also explains why the brain has distinct cell types such as grid and object-vector cells.