Artificial neural networks for motor control usually adopt generic architectures like fully connected MLPs. While general, these tabula rasa architectures rely on large amounts of experience to learn, are not easily transferable to new bodies, and have internal dynamics that are difficult to interpret. In nature, animals are born with highly structured connectivity in their nervous systems shaped by evolution; this innate circuitry acts synergistically with learning mechanisms to provide inductive biases that enable most animals to function well soon after birth and learn efficiently. Convolutional networks inspired by visual circuitry have encoded useful biases for vision. However, it is unknown the extent to which ANN architectures inspired by neural circuitry can yield useful biases for other AI domains. In this work, we ask what advantages biologically inspired ANN architecture can provide in the domain of motor control.

We propose loss function week enforcement of the velocity relations between time-series points in the Kinematic-Informed artificial Neural Networks (KINN) for long-term stock prediction. Problems of the series volatility, Out-of-Distribution (OOD) test data, and outliers in training data are addressed by (Artificial Neural Networks) ANN's learning not only future points prediction but also by learning velocity relations between the points, such a way as avoiding unrealistic spurious predictions. The presented loss function penalizes not only errors between predictions and supervised label data, but also errors between the next point prediction and the previous point plus velocity prediction. The loss function is tested on the multiple popular and exotic AR ANN architectures, and around fifteen years of Dow Jones function demonstrated statistically meaningful improvement across the normalization-sensitive activation functions prone to spurious behaviour in the OOD data conditions. Results show that such architecture addresses the issue of the normalization in the auto-regressive models that break the data topology by weakly enforcing the data neighbourhood proximity (relation) preservation during the ANN transformation.

We investigate a number of Artificial Neural Network architectures (well-known and more ``exotic'') in application to the long-term financial time-series forecasts of indexes on different global markets. The particular area of interest of this research is to examine the correlation of these indexes' behaviour in terms of Machine Learning algorithms cross-training. Would training an algorithm on an index from one global market produce similar or even better accuracy when such a model is applied for predicting another index from a different market? The demonstrated predominately positive answer to this question is another argument in favour of the long-debated Efficient Market Hypothesis of Eugene Fama.

Large Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models have demonstrated success in various domains, including general text and image generation, drug discovery, and protein-RNA (ribonucleic acid) binding tasks. However, these models typically demand substantial computational resources, time, and data for effective training. Given that such extensive resources are often inaccessible to many researchers and that life sciences data sets are frequently limited, we investigated whether small ANN models could achieve acceptable accuracy in protein-RNA prediction. We experimented with shallow feed-forward ANNs comprising two hidden layers and various non-linearities. These models did not utilize explicit structural information; instead, a sliding window approach was employed to implicitly consider the context of neighboring residues and bases. We explored different training techniques to address the issue of highly unbalanced data. Among the seven most popular non-linearities for feed-forward ANNs, only three: Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU), Gated Linear Unit (GLU), and Hyperbolic Tangent (Tanh) yielded converging models. Common re-balancing techniques, such as under- and over-sampling of training sets, proved ineffective, whereas increasing the volume of training data and using model ensembles significantly improved performance. The optimal context window size, balancing both false negative and false positive errors, was found to be approximately 30 residues and bases. Our findings indicate that high-accuracy protein-RNA binding prediction is achievable using computing hardware accessible to most educational and research institutions.

In this work, we ask what advantages biologically inspired ANN architecture can provide in the domain of motor control.

In the field of pedometrics, tabular machine learning is the predominant method for predicting soil properties from remote and proximal soil sensing data, forming a central component of digital soil mapping. At the field-scale, this predictive soil modeling (PSM) task is typically constrained by small training sample sizes and high feature-to-sample ratios in soil spectroscopy. Traditionally, these conditions have proven challenging for conventional deep learning methods. Classical machine learning algorithms, particularly tree-based models like Random Forest and linear models such as Partial Least Squares Regression, have long been the default choice for field-scale PSM. Recent advances in artificial neural networks (ANN) for tabular data challenge this view, yet their suitability for field-scale PSM has not been proven. We introduce a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates state-of-the-art ANN architectures, including the latest multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based models (TabM, RealMLP), attention-based transformer variants (FT-Transformer, ExcelFormer, T2G-Former, AMFormer), retrieval-augmented approaches (TabR, ModernNCA), and an in-context learning foundation model (TabPFN). Our evaluation encompasses 31 field- and farm-scale datasets containing 30 to 460 samples and three critical soil properties: soil organic matter or soil organic carbon, pH, and clay content. Our results reveal that modern ANNs consistently outperform classical methods on the majority of tasks, demonstrating that deep learning has matured sufficiently to overcome the long-standing dominance of classical machine learning for PSM. Notably, TabPFN delivers the strongest overall performance, showing robustness across varying conditions. We therefore recommend the adoption of modern ANNs for field-scale PSM and propose TabPFN as the new default choice in the toolkit of every pedometrician.

Artificial neural networks for motor control usually adopt generic architectures like fully connected MLPs. While general, these tabula rasa architectures rely on large amounts of experience to learn, are not easily transferable to new bodies, and have internal dynamics that are difficult to interpret. In nature, animals are born with highly structured connectivity in their nervous systems shaped by evolution; this innate circuitry acts synergistically with learning mechanisms to provide inductive biases that enable most animals to function well soon after birth and learn efficiently. Convolutional networks inspired by visual circuitry have encoded useful biases for vision. However, it is unknown the extent to which ANN architectures inspired by neural circuitry can yield useful biases for other AI domains. In this work, we ask what advantages biologically inspired ANN architecture can provide in the domain of motor control.

Submitted to ApJS ABSTRACT In modern astronomy, the quantity of data collected has vastly exceeded the capacity for manual analysis, necessitating the use of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to assist scientists with the most labor-intensive tasks. AI can optimize simulation codes where computational bottlenecks arise from the time required to generate forward models. One such example is PHOEBE, a modeling code for eclipsing binaries (EBs), where simulating individual systems is feasible, but analyzing observables for extensive parameter combinations is highly time-consuming. To address this, we present a fully connected feedforward artificial neural network (ANN) trained on a dataset of over one million synthetic light curves generated with PHOEBE. Optimization of the ANN architecture yielded a model with six hidden layers, each containing 512 nodes, provides an optimized balance between accuracy and computational complexity. Extensive testing enabled us to establish ANN's applicability limits and to quantify the systematic and statistical errors associated with using such networks for EB analysis. Our findings demonstrate the critical role of dilution effects in parameter estimation for EBs, and we outline methods to incorporate these effects in AI-based models. This proposed ANN framework enables a speedup of over four orders of magnitude compared to traditional methods, with systematic errors not exceeding 1%, and often as low as 0.01%, across the entire parameter space. INTRODUCTION number of EBs are found in triple and multiple systems (Conroy et al. 2014; Orosz 2015), hosting circumbinary Fundamental stellar properties are inferred predominantly planets (Welsh et al. 2015), and featuring mass from the study of eclipsing binary stars (EBs) transfer and apsidal motion (Hambleton et al. 2013); (Torres et al. 2010). Their favorable orbital alignment these broaden the domains of study while retaining the with the line of sight, and consequent eclipses, make same tractable modeling principles. In particular, we them ideal astrophysical laboratories: a simple geometry can probe stellar interiors by studying tidally induced coupled with well-understood dynamical laws allow oscillations and gravity-mode pulsations in detached binaries us to obtain fundamental parameters without a-priori (Huber 2015); ubiquitous contact binaries are still assumptions (Prša 2018). Many of the phenomena being observed in hot that, we need samplers such as Markov Chain Monte Jupiters have their foundations in EB studies, e.g., the Carlo (MCMC, Foreman-Mackey et al. 2017) to provide Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, tidal distortions of the host heuristic parameter posteriors. This entails hundreds of star, irradiation effects, Roche lobe overflow and wind thousands if not millions of forward-model runs, which outflows, gravity darkening, apsidal motion, third body puts a hard limit on the number of systems we can solve dynamics, etc. (Barclay et al. 2012).

Learning-based approaches to quadruped locomotion commonly adopt generic policy architectures like fully connected MLPs. As such architectures contain few inductive biases, it is common in practice to incorporate priors in the form of rewards, training curricula, imitation data, or trajectory generators. In nature, animals are born with priors in the form of their nervous system's architecture, which has been shaped by evolution to confer innate ability and efficient learning. For instance, a horse can walk within hours of birth and can quickly improve with practice. Such architectural priors can also be useful in ANN architectures for AI. In this work, we explore the advantages of a biologically inspired ANN architecture for quadruped locomotion based on neural circuits in the limbs and spinal cord of mammals. Our architecture achieves good initial performance and comparable final performance to MLPs, while using less data and orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Our architecture also exhibits better generalization to task variations, even admitting deployment on a physical robot without standard sim-to-real methods. This work shows that neural circuits can provide valuable architectural priors for locomotion and encourages future work in other sensorimotor skills.