Incorporation of single-neuron projectome-based connectivity motifs enhances the cortex-specific performance of artificial neural networks

The organizational principles of natural neural networks could inspire the new architecture design of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Analysis of single-neuron connectomes of mouse brains revealed distinct profiles of three-node connectivity motifs in various cortical areas and hippocampal formation. A connectome-informed neural network algorithm ("CINA") was developed to incorporate natural connectivity motifs into ANN algorithms represented by recurrent neural network (RNN) and transformer-based large language model (LLM). We found that incorporation of the average profile of cortical motifs improved the RNNs performance in noise-resistant categorization and motor learning benchmark tasks, as compared with RNNs with random connectivity. Notably, incorporating cortex-specific motifs further elevated the RNNs performance in tasks related to the cortical function, and this effect was enhanced by artificially increasing the bias in the motif profile. Similar experimental results were verified on an LLM using Motif-Transformer for natural language question answering and brain-signal decoding tasks. Graph-theoretic analyses showed that incorporating natural motifs drove the emergence of modular and small-world properties in ANNs. Together, we demonstrated not only connectome-inspired optimization of ANN architecture but also functional significance of specific motif profiles in various cortices.