# Biologically Inspired Semantic Lateral Connectivity for Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09830 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09830/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Routing Between Capsules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09829/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lateral connections play an important role for sensory processing in visual cortex by supporting discriminable neuronal responses even to highly similar features. In the present work, we show that establishing a biologically inspired Mexican hat lateral connectivity profile along the filter domain can significantly improve the classification accuracy of a variety of lightweight convolutional neural networks without the addition of trainable network parameters. Moreover, we demonstrate that it is possible to analytically determine the stationary distribution of modulated filter activations and thereby avoid using recurrence for modeling temporal dynamics. We furthermore reveal that the Mexican hat connectivity profile has the effect of ordering filters in a sequence resembling the topographic organization of feature selectivity in early visual cortex. In an ordered filter sequence, this profile then sharpens the filters' tuning curves.