# Lessons from Neuroscience for AI: How integrating Actions, Compositional Structure and Episodic Memory could enable Safe, Interpretable and Human-Like AI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22568 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22568/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 158 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15334/) (2023)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [HyperNetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09106/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The phenomenal advances in large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models over the past few years have been based on optimizing large-scale transformer models on the surprisingly simple objective of minimizing next-token prediction loss, a form of predictive coding that is also the backbone of an increasingly popular model of brain function in neuroscience and cognitive science. However, current foundation models ignore three other important components of state-of-the-art predictive coding models: tight integration of actions with generative models, hierarchical compositional structure, and episodic memory. We propose that to achieve safe, interpretable, energy-efficient, and human-like AI, foundation models should integrate actions, at multiple scales of abstraction, with a compositional generative architecture and episodic memory. We present recent evidence from neuroscience and cognitive science on the importance of each of these components. We describe how the addition of these missing components to foundation models could help address some of their current deficiencies: hallucinations and superficial understanding of concepts due to lack of grounding, a missing sense of agency/responsibility due to lack of control, threats to safety and trustworthiness due to lack of interpretability, and energy inefficiency. We compare our proposal to current trends, such as adding chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to foundation models, and discuss new ways of augmenting these models with brain-inspired components. We conclude by arguing that a rekindling of the historically fruitful exchange of ideas between brain science and AI will help pave the way towards safe and interpretable human-centered AI.