Large-scale projects to build

artificial brains: ABACCUS.

Włodzisław Duch (Google: Duch)

Department of Informatics,
Nicolaus Copernicus University,
Torun, Poland

School of Computer Engineering,

Nanyang Technological University (NTU),
Singapore
Building Artificial Brain – workshop after ICANN 2005, Sept 15, 2005
 Attention-Based Artificial Cognitive Control
Understanding System (ABACCUS)
Large EU integrated project (>150 pp), with 9 participants:

• King’s College London (John G. Taylor, coordinator), UK

• Centre for Brain & Cognitive Development, Berkbeck College,
University of London, UK
• Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Medical Research Council, UK

• Robotics and Embedded Systems, Technical University of Munich,

G
• Institute of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology,
Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, G
• Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and
Technology – Hellas, Heraklion, Crete, GR
• National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Athens, GR
• Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica, Telematica, Universita di
Genova, I
• Dep. of Informatics, Nicholaus Copernicus University, Torun, PL
Now changed to “Brain as Complex System” (BRACS)
 ABACCUS Goals
• Assumption: gross neuroanatomical brain structure is critical for its
function, therefore it should be preserved.
• To demonstrate how fusion of the appropriate brain-based models,
guided by the overall architecture of the brain, and by its
developmental learning stages, can help attain high-level cognitive
processing capabilities.
• Show basic language understanding and reasoning abilities for direct
human-machine communication, at the level of a pre-school child,
mimicking solutions used by the human brain.
• Develop an attention control systems for focusing in sensory
surveillance tasks, and for image searching.
• Development of control structures for autonomous machines.
• Create its own goals in an autonomous fashion.
• Founded on neuro-scientific understanding of attention and the
sensory and motor systems it controls, development in children,
simplified modeling, computer power.
 Sketch of the ABACCUS system
Computational Platform, Simulation Environment and Integration

Neuroscience and Development

Vision Speech Tactile

Learning of
PFC goals
Memory
System
Motor Control Feedback Working
Attention Control Memory
system Atomization
system

Reasoning Value Maps Drive and Action/Object

System Intrinsic reward reward system
system

Rough sketch of the ABACCUS system, based on simplified

spiking neurons.
 Primary objective 1
 To develop linguistic powers of ABACCUS system.

 Use training of single words by associating their representations to

internal representations of objects and actions.

 Use pair-wise associations to learn word pairs (like ‘kick ball’),

extend syntactically and functionally the use of function words.

 Working memory modules, with associated phonological coding,

will be created and fused in the language component, both for
speech understanding and generation.

 Extension for abstract concepts by tagging the associated words to

clusters of concrete object/action representations.
 Primary objective 2
 To create a high-level cognitive system, able to solve problems
requiring reasoning, thinking, imagination and creativity.

 Based on the basic control concept of a forward model, acting as

a predictor and working under attention control.
 Forward models include various semantic and goal networks.

 Sequences of activations of representations will be learnt and

thereby used to achieve goals.
 Various of these forward models will be present and branch into
each other during the running process by means of lateral
connections.
 New routes will occur allowing complex goals to be achieved, or
even new, previously unrecognized goals, to be arrived at
(required for creativity).
 Example of action internal models
Rough sketch of the ACTION
subnetwork.
Sensory information enters the
supplementary motor area (SMA)

(1) cortico-thalamo-cortical (the

‘short’ loop);
(2) cortico-striatal-GPi-thalamo-
cortical (the ‘long’ loop);
(3) cortico-(STNGPe)-GPi-
thalamo-cortical (‘first indirect’ loop);
(4) cortico-striatal-(STNGPe)-GPi-
thalamo-cortical (the ‘second
indirect’ loop).
 Primary objective 3
 Extract a simplified architecture for the attention control system.

 Should involve both sensory and motor control, especially joint

sensory-motor control, systems whose creation is guided by
neuroscientific knowledge about the brain.

 Approach based on infant development to train ABACCUS

incrementally on the computer platform.

 Use neuroscientific data to guide the architecture of a large-scale

neural simulation of the relevant components of the human brain.

 Use feed-forward/feedback training simulations based on the

simplified brain architecture following developmental processes,
using the sensor and response signals of the robotic embodiment.
 Primary objective 4
 Developing the ability to learn novel objects, both as stimuli and
as associated reward values.

 Use reward/penalty feedback training with attention control, with

associated value maps constructed to learn to encode the values
of stimuli and responses to them in the environment.

 Temporal sequence or schemata (as object/action sequences as

well as the associated rewards involved) will be constructed to
function as predictors and so support reasoning, along with
automatic response learning.

 Neural codes of visual, auditory and tactile concepts will be learnt

in a feedforward manner, without attention, as will codes for motor
responses controlling the embodied robot.
 Primary objective 5
Develop a robotic embodiment; this involves:

 Specification of robots available for ABACCUS control.

 Development of sensor and response systems in the robot.

 Sensory data mappings to the central computational platform.

 An environmental task domain in which ABACCUS can develop its

concepts and cognitive powers.
 Simulation platform for the developmental training (on a Beowulf
cluster or similar powerful computer system).

 Specifications for integration of various models on the central

computational platform.

 Compatibility of computational languages used by partners.

 Attention Control
 Attention control systems will be achieved by use of the early flow of
activity from low-level cortex rapidly to prefrontal sites.

 This initially uncoded activity will be used to bias feedback activity

sent to parietal and/or temporal lobe, so as to bias the attention
feedback from there down to the activated inputs encoded in the
object representations in the temporal lobe.

 This feedback loop will be trained by causal Hebbian learning, with

the attention feedback represented by contrast gain amplification, so
by sigma-pi network quadratic nodes, onto neurons in hierarchically
lower modules; the goal representations will be learnt as part of this
processing.

 The manner in which a dual-control stereo camera can be used most

effectively will be explored by modeling the manner in which eye and
attention control are separable.
 Drives, Value Maps & Emotions
 Drives and reflexes will be enumerated and modeled as separate
systems to be used as a launching pad for more controlled
developmental sensory representations and responses.

 The rewards system will also be developed as a separate

component, based on the learning of reward/error prediction.

 ABACCUS will be trained by reward error to develop value maps for

objects and responses as goals, to bias learning of feedback
attention to filter out responses in complex environments. The effect
of the reward signal will be checked to determine if there is any
modification of the earlier goal representations learnt under attention
control.

 Value maps associated to rewards attached to sequences of stimuli

(schemata) will give emotional bias in the cognitive decision-making
it can perform.
 Short-term working memory
 Two sorts of working memory are presently known: buffer or slave
working memories, of a fixed and limited persistence, and longer
lasting prefrontal activities of duration determined by the
importance and difficulty of the goal they represent.

 Buffer memory is fed by the semantic representations, whose

activity they extend, and thereby allow the development of
attended state estimators in the various modalities for more
general use across other cortical regions, especially goal sites.

 Buffer sites will be modeled by suitable recurrent circuits coupled to

the semantic maps from which they receive input.

 Rehearsal of the working memory will be extended to various

transformations that are also known to occur in goal sites, such as
deletion, comparison and related functions.
 Concept Understanding and Abstraction

 High–level concepts will be created by use of a hierarchy of

networks, each being more specific in its features to which it is
responsive than the next lower one.
 The understanding based on such ontology allows to ‘understand’
various levels of concepts, by the associated super- or sub-
ordinate concept levels activated by trained connectivity at the
levels of specificity allowed by the number of hierarchical layers.
 Abstraction will arise through creation of specific connections of a
new word representation, describing the concept, to its various
more concrete word and object/action representatives.
 Word representations will be linked to emotion state descriptors,
that are connected to the associated reward value map
representations of the associated system state. For example the
word ‘anger’ would be associated with the underlying state arising
from blockage, by the environment, of the gaining of a goal.
 Basic tasks
 2D domain, enclosed within four walls with obstacles on the floor
and 2D objects on the walls, of varying shapes (square, triangle,
circle) and colors (red, green, blue), emitting various tones.
Objects are potential goals, to be learnt and responded to.

 Perceptions/Concepts: To develop internal representations of the

2D objects, based on shape/color feature maps created by
learning, after relevant clustering on the feature map activations,
to learn a representation for the objects.

 Actions/Goals: learn to touch/manipulate the 2D objects based on

stimulus-action rewards and fused representation as a goal; to
attentionally bias lower order perceptual representations just
learnt (using dopamine-based reward learning).
 Intermediate tasks
 2D domain with walls, with 3D objects as potential goals; objects
with simple shapes (sphere, box, ring), colors, emitting various
sounds, some in motion (to help develop tracking).

 Perception/Concepts/Goals: To develop internal representations of

the 3D objects, based on a set of their 2D views, clustered over
time (by use of binocular representations of depth). Certain
examples of moving stimuli will be created so as to be learnt.

 Actions/rewards: Motor responses to move specific objects to

certain places, such as to stack an object on top of another, or
place one object inside another (object fusion observed developing
in both chimps and human infants).

 Language: Word maps for actions and objects concepts will be

created, using associations of the word maps to the relevant object
maps; attention will be important in this learning process.
 Advanced task domain
 Perception/Concepts/Goals: complex 3D objects present with various
features in various modalities, including animal shapes emitting
sounds and smells. The internal concept representations will be
extended to hierarchies of concepts, so leading to abstraction
processes (where more abstract, basic level concepts are activated,
such as that for ‘animal’ by specific animal inputs, so leading to
spread of activity to related concepts and to associated reasoning
potentialities).

 Actions: with added complex tasks requiring reasoning to achieve

fast/accurate responses: manipulating objects, putting objects into
slots/matching shapes, Tower of Hanoi (involving virtual movements
of objects – translations and stacking – at a fixed set of different
sites), Incident Detection, etc. AI-based approaches to such tasks
exist (cf. SOAR), but ABACCUS will be based on the flexible
posterior representation transformation, goal creating and resolving
powers of a neural system.
 More on advanced task domain
Language powers will be expanded so that ABACCUS can be talked to,
using limited length word strings (initially of length two or three). These
strings will be understood in terms of the associated object/action maps
and responses made by the system, either as actions or action
sequences or suitably meaningful speech responses. Reasoning and
creation of new types of responses will be done by use of lateral
spreading in memory to achieve new trajectories in the schemata space.

The ‘Incident Detection & Tracking Scenario’ involves a robot moving in

the internal environment, although with novel stimuli and obstacle layout.
This includes ramps and stationary or slow moving obstacles. Candidate
events of interest in this paradigm are:
a) Moving entity detection and classification (humans, animals).
b) Static environment variation detection (unexpected objects).
c) Abnormal auditory events.
d) Abnormal visual events.
 Work packages

Summary of ABACCUS workpackages.

 Summary
ABACCUS is the most ambitious project formulated so far,
an attempt to simulate functions of most brain structures.

High order functions (including conscious-like behavior?)

should result from elementary interactions in a system with
proper brain-like architecture.

Neuroscience and developmental science integrated in one

computational model, useful for behavioral experiments and
computational psychiatry.

Wish us good luck ...