Single-unit activations confer inductive biases for emergent circuit solutions to cognitive tasks

Abstract

Trained recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have become the leading framework for modeling neural dynamics in the brain, owing to their capacity to mimic how population-level computations arise from interactions among many units with heterogeneous responses. RNN units are commonly modeled using various nonlinear activation functions, assuming these architectural differences do not affect emerging task solutions. Contrary to this view, we show that single-unit activation functions confer inductive biases that influence the geometry of neural population trajectories, single-unit selectivity, and fixed point configurations. Using a model distillation approach, we find that differences in neural representations and dynamics reflect qualitatively distinct circuit solutions to cognitive tasks emerging in RNNs with different activation functions, leading to disparate generalization behavior on out-of-distribution inputs. Our results show that seemingly minor architectural differences provide strong inductive biases for task solutions, raising a question about which RNN architectures better align with mechanisms of task execution in biological networks.