Most recurrent neural networks (RNNs) do not include a fundamental constraint of real neural circuits: Dale's Law, which implies that neurons must be excitatory (E) or inhibitory (I). Dale's Law is generally absent from RNNs because simply partitioning a standard network's units into E and I populations impairs learning. However, here we extend a recent feedforward bio-inspired EI network architecture, named Dale's ANNs, to recurrent networks, and demonstrate that good performance is possible while respecting Dale's Law. This begs the question: What makes some forms of EI network learn poorly and others learn well? And, why does the simple approach of incorporating Dale's Law impair learning? Historically the answer was thought to be the sign constraints on EI network parameters, and this was a motivation behind Dale's ANNs. However, here we show the spectral properties of the recurrent weight matrix at initialisation are more impactful on network performance than sign constraints. We find that simple EI partitioning results in a singular value distribution that is multimodal and dispersed, whereas standard RNNs have an unimodal, more clustered singular value distribution, as do recurrent Dale's ANNs. We also show that the spectral properties and performance of partitioned EI networks are worse for small networks with fewer I units, and we present normalised SVD entropy as a measure of spectrum pathology that correlates with performance.

Numerous real-world systems, ranging from healthcare to energy grids, involve users competing for finite and potentially scarce resources. Designing policies for repeated resource allocation in such real-world systems is challenging for many reasons, including the changing nature of user types and their (possibly urgent) need for resources. Researchers have developed numerous machine learning solutions for determining repeated resource allocation policies in these challenging settings. However, a key limitation has been the absence of good methods and test-beds for benchmarking these policies; almost all resource allocation policies are benchmarked in environments which are either completely synthetic or do not allow any deviation from historical data. In this paper we introduce AllSim, which is a benchmarking environment for realistically simulating the impact and utility of policies for resource allocation in systems in which users compete for such scarce resources. Building such a benchmarking environment is challenging because it needs to successfully take into account the entire collective of potential users and the impact a resource allocation policy has on all the other users in the system. AllSim's benchmarking environment is modular (each component being parameterized individually), learnable (informed by historical data), and customizable (adaptable to changing conditions). These, when interacting with an allocation policy, produce a dataset of simulated outcomes for evaluation and comparison of such policies. We believe AllSim is an essential step towards a more systematic evaluation of policies for scarce resource allocation compared to current approaches for benchmarking such methods.

The transferability of adversarial perturbations provides an effective shortcut for black-box attacks. Targeted perturbations have greater practicality but are more difficult to transfer between models. In this paper, we experimentally and theoretically demonstrated that neural networks trained on the same dataset have more consistent performance in High-Sample-Density-Regions (HSDR) of each class instead of low sample density regions. Therefore, in the target setting, adding perturbations towards HSDR of the target class is more effective in improving transferability. However, density estimation is challenging in high-dimensional scenarios.

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to comprehend the intricate relationships between humans and objects, predicting < human,action,object >triplets, and serving as the foundation for numerous computer vision tasks. The complexity and diversity of human-object interactions in the real world, however, pose significant challenges for both annotation and recognition, particularly in recognizing interactions within an open world context. This study explores the universal interaction recognition in an open-world setting through the use of Vision-Language (VL) foundation models and large language models (LLMs). The proposed method is dubbed as UniHOI. We conduct a deep analysis of the three hierarchical features inherent in visual HOI detectors and propose a method for high-level relation extraction aimed at VL foundation models, which we call HO prompt-based learning. Our design includes an HOPrompt-guided Decoder (HOPD), facilitates the association of high-level relation representations in the foundation model with various HO pairs within the image. Furthermore, we utilize a LLM (i.e.