Papers › Testing the Genomic Bottleneck Hypothesis in Hebbian Meta-Learning
Testing the Genomic Bottleneck Hypothesis in Hebbian Meta-Learning
Rasmus Berg Palm, Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
Hebbian meta-learning has recently shown promise to solve hard reinforcement learning problems, allowing agents to adapt to some degree to changes in the environment. However, because each synapse in these approaches can learn a very specific learning rule, the ability to generalize to very different situations is likely reduced. We hypothesize that limiting the number of Hebbian learning rules through a "genomic bottleneck" can act as a regularizer leading to better generalization across changes to the environment. We test this hypothesis by decoupling the number of Hebbian learning rules from the number of synapses and systematically varying the number of Hebbian learning rules. The results in this paper suggest that simultaneously learning the Hebbian learning rules and their assignment to synapses is a difficult optimization problem, leading to poor performance in the environments tested. However, parallel research to ours finds that it is indeed possible to reduce the number of learning rules by clustering similar rules together. How to best implement a "genomic bottleneck" algorithm is thus an important research direction that warrants further investigation.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections