Discovering heterogeneous synaptic plasticity rules via large-scale neural evolution

Abstract

Synaptic plasticity is a fundamental substrate for learning and memory, where different synapse types exhibit distinct plasticity mechanisms. However, how functional behaviors emerge from heterogeneous synaptic plasticity mechanisms remains poorly understood. Here, we introduce a computational framework that harnesses Darwinian evolutionary principles to discover biologically plausible, heterogeneous synaptic plasticity rules within a biologically realistic model of the mouse primary visual cortex. Specifically, we parameterize several key factors related to synaptic plasticity, including presynaptic and postsynaptic spikes, their associated eligibility traces, and neuromodulatory signals. By integrating these factors via a truncated Taylor expansion, we construct a large-scale search space of candidate plasticity rules, with each rule containing over 2.6k optimizable parameters. Each rule is subsequently evaluated on both cross-domain visual task performance and biological validity. Leveraging a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, we effectively navigate this high-dimensional search space to identify plasticity rules that are both biologically plausible and yield high task performance. We uncover diverse families of high-performing plasticity rules that achieve similar behavioral outcomes despite markedly different mathematical formulations, suggesting that real-world synaptic learning mechanisms may exhibit computational degeneracy. We further show that these biologically plausible rules are not only robust across network scales but also enable few-shot learning, offering a computational explanation for the emergence of innate ability.