To date, most dendritic studies have predominantly focused on the apical zone of pyramidal two-point neurons (TPNs) receiving only feedback (FB) connections from higher perceptual layers and using them for learning. Recent cellular neurophysiology and computational neuroscience studies suggests that the apical input (context), coming from feedback and lateral connections, is multifaceted and far more diverse, with greater implications for ongoing learning and processing in the brain than previously realized. In addition to the FB, the apical tuft receives signals from neighboring cells of the same network as proximal (P) context, other parts of the brain as distal (D) context, and overall coherent information across the network as universal (U) context. The integrated context (C) amplifies and suppresses the transmission of coherent and conflicting feedforward (FF) signals, respectively. Specifically, we show that complex context-sensitive (CS)-TPNs flexibly integrate C moment-by-moment with the FF somatic current at the soma such that the somatic current is amplified when both feedforward (FF) and C are coherent; otherwise, it is attenuated. This generates the event only when the FF and C currents are coherent, which is then translated into a singlet or a burst based on the FB information. Spiking simulation results show that this flexible integration of somatic and contextual currents enables the propagation of more coherent signals (bursts), making learning faster with fewer neurons. Similar behavior is observed when this functioning is used in conventional artificial networks, where orders of magnitude fewer neurons are required to process vast amounts of heterogeneous real-world audio-visual (AV) data trained using backpropagation (BP). The computational findings presented here demonstrate the universality of CS-TPNs, suggesting a dendritic narrative that was previously overlooked.

Quantifying unknown quantum entanglement experimentally is a difficult task, but also becomes more and more necessary because of the fast development of quantum engineering. Machine learning provides practical solutions to this fundamental problem, where one has to train a proper machine learning model to predict entanglement measures of unknown quantum states based on experimentally measurable data, say moments or correlation data produced by local measurements. In this paper, we compare the performance of these two different machine learning approaches systematically. Particularly, we first show that the approach based on moments enjoys a remarkable advantage over that based on correlation data, though the cost of measuring moments is much higher. Next, since correlation data is much easier to obtain experimentally, we try to better its performance by proposing a hybrid quantum-classical machine learning framework for this problem, where the key is to train optimal local measurements to generate more informative correlation data. Our numerical simulations show that the new framework brings us comparable performance with the approach based on moments to quantify unknown entanglement. Our work implies that it is already practical to fulfill such tasks on near-term quantum devices.

We report on the usefulness of using neural networks as a variational state ansatz for many-body quantum systems in the context of quantum information-processing tasks. In the neural network state ansatz, the complex amplitude function of a quantum state is computed by a neural network. The resulting multipartite entanglement structure captured by this ansatz has proven rich enough to describe the ground states and unitary dynamics of various physical systems of interest. In the present paper, we supply further evidence for the usefulness of neural network states to describe multipartite entanglement. We demonstrate that neural network states are capable of efficiently representing quantum codes for quantum information transmission and quantum error correction. In particular, we show that a) neural network states yield quantum codes with a high coherent information for two important quantum channels, the depolarizing channel and the dephrasure channel; b) neural network states can be used to represent absolutely maximally entangled states, a special type of quantum error correction codes. In both cases, the neural network state ansatz provides an efficient and versatile means as variational parametrization of these states.