Spatial synaptic regularization stabilizes learning across biological and artificial neural networks
Zhu, H.; Chen, Y.; Zhao, P.; Xiong, Z.; Peng, H.; Wu, F.; Zhang, R.
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How the spatial organization of synapses contributes to stable learning remains a fundamental question in neuroscience. Using the H01 electron microscopy connectome of human temporal cortex, we found that dendritic spines clustered morphologically, whereas synaptic weights followed a center-elevated, surround-suppressed arrangement along dendrites. A regularized Hebbian model formalized this spatial signature, showing that strong synapses lower the probability that neighboring synapses reach high-weight states. Translating this principle into Spatial Synaptic Regularization (SSR) reduced forgetting and stabilized learning across diverse artificial networks and tasks, including continual visual learning, large language-model knowledge editing, and parameter-efficient adaptation of vision-language models, by preserving high-rank, low-overlap representations. These findings identify spatial synaptic organization as an unrecognized dimension for stabilizing learning and show that structural connectomics can yield actionable AI methods.
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