# Purin: A Biology-inspired Mechanism for Artificial Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31235/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Pay Attention to MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08050/) (2021)
- [AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05167/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08150/) (2018)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [SuperSpike: Supervised learning in multi-layer spiking neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.11146/) (2017)
- [Long short-term memory and learning-to-learn in networks of spiking neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09574/) (2018)
- [Towards an integration of deep learning and neuroscience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03813/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) usually represent neural transmission with fixed trainable weights during a training batch, which omits short-term changes in synaptic efficacy. In addition, the discrete time-step simulation requires additional temporal processing that many conventional ANN architectures do not use. To overcome these challenges, we propose Purin, a biology-inspired and ANN-compatible mechanism, that introduces synaptic efficacy modulation into conventional convolutional neural networks. Purin uses a time-interval-based abstraction for neural activities, which allows Purin to introduce short- and long-term synaptic efficacy changes without using discrete time-steps. Purin introduces a bounded factor to represent temporary synaptic efficacy changes, together with two weight matrices that represent input-side and output-side efficacy. The weight matrices are updated by backpropagation and interpreted as the long-term synaptic efficacy changes. Experimental results show that after removing the confounding factors in the AlexNet, VGG11, and GoogLeNet architectures, Purin improves the classification accuracies in all three models across the evaluated datasets.