Helpless infants are learning a foundation model.

Humans have a protracted postnatal helplessness period, typically attributed to human-specific maternal constraints causing an early birth when the brain is highly immature. By aligning neurodevelopmental events across species, however, it has been found that humans are not born with especially immature brains compared with animal species with a shorter helpless period. Consistent with this, the rapidly growing field of infant neuroimaging has found that brain connectivity and functional activation at birth share many similarities with the mature brain. Inspired by machine learning, where deep neural networks also benefit from a 'helpless period' of pre-training, we propose that human infants are learning a foundation model: a set of fundamental representations that underpin later cognition with high performance and rapid generalisation.

Modeling natural images using gated MRFs.

This paper describes a Markov Random Field for real-valued image modeling that has two sets of latent variables. One set is used to gate the interactions between all pairs of pixels, while the second set determines the mean intensities of each pixel. This is a powerful model with a conditional distribution over the input that is Gaussian, with both mean and covariance determined by the configuration of latent variables, which is unlike previous models that were restricted to using Gaussians with either a fixed mean or a diagonal covariance matrix. Thanks to the increased flexibility, this gated MRF can generate more realistic samples after training on an unconstrained distribution of high-resolution natural images. Furthermore, the latent variables of the model can be inferred efficiently and can be used as very effective descriptors in recognition tasks. Both generation and discrimination drastically improve as layers of binary latent variables are added to the model, yielding a hierarchical model called a Deep Belief Network.