Author name cluster

Kanaka Rajan

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

8 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments

Riley Simmons-Edler
Ryan Badman
Felix Berg
Raymond Chua
John Vastola
Joshua Lunger
William Qian
Kanaka Rajan

Understanding the behavior of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents—particularly as task and agent sophistication increase—requires more than simple comparison of reward curves, yet standard methods for behavioral analysis remain underdeveloped in DRL. We apply tools from neuroscience and ethology to study DRL agents in a novel, complex, partially observable environment, ForageWorld, designed to capture key aspects of real-world animal foraging—including sparse, depleting resource patches, predator threats, and spatially extended arenas. We use this environment as a platform for applying joint behavioral and neural analysis to agents, revealing detailed, quantitatively grounded insights into agent strategies, memory, and planning. Contrary to common assumptions, we find that model-free RNN-based DRL agents can exhibit structured, planning-like behavior purely through emergent dynamics—without requiring explicit memory modules or world models. Our results show that studying DRL agents like animals—analyzing them with neuroethology-inspired tools that reveal structure in both behavior and neural dynamics—uncovers rich structure in their learning dynamics that would otherwise remain invisible. We distill these tools into a general analysis framework linking core behavioral and representational features to diagnostic methods, which can be reused for a wide range of tasks and agents. As agents grow more complex and autonomous, bridging neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI will be essential—not just for understanding their behavior, but for ensuring safe alignment and maximizing desirable behaviors that are hard to measure via reward. We show how this can be done by drawing on lessons from how biological intelligence is studied.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Gradient Descent as Loss Landscape Navigation: a Normative Framework for Deriving Learning Rules

John Vastola
Samuel J Gershman
Kanaka Rajan

Learning rules—prescriptions for updating model parameters to improve performance—are typically assumed rather than derived. Why do some learning rules work better than others, and under what assumptions can a given rule be considered optimal? We propose a theoretical framework that casts learning rules as policies for navigating (partially observable) loss landscapes, and identifies optimal rules as solutions to an associated optimal control problem. A range of well-known rules emerge naturally within this framework under different assumptions: gradient descent from short-horizon optimization, momentum from longer-horizon planning, natural gradients from accounting for parameter space geometry, non-gradient rules from partial controllability, and adaptive optimizers like Adam from online Bayesian inference of loss landscape shape. We further show that continual learning strategies like weight resetting can be understood as optimal responses to task uncertainty. By unifying these phenomena under a single objective, our framework clarifies the computational structure of learning and offers a principled foundation for designing adaptive algorithms.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Measuring and Controlling Solution Degeneracy across Task-Trained Recurrent Neural Networks

Ann Huang
Satpreet Harcharan Singh
Flavio Martinelli
Kanaka Rajan

Task-trained recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are widely used in neuroscience and machine learning to model dynamical computations. To gain mechanistic insight into how neural systems solve tasks, prior work often reverse-engineers individual trained networks. However, different RNNs trained on the same task and achieving similar performance can exhibit strikingly different internal solutions, a phenomenon known as solution degeneracy. Here, we develop a unified framework to systematically quantify and control solution degeneracy across three levels: behavior, neural dynamics, and weight space. We apply this framework to 3, 400 RNNs trained on four neuroscience-relevant tasks: flip-flop memory, sine wave generation, delayed discrimination, and path integration, while systematically varying task complexity, learning regime, network size, and regularization. We find that increased task complexity and stronger feature learning reduce degeneracy in neural dynamics but increase it in weight space, with mixed effects on behavior. In contrast, larger networks and structural regularization reduce degeneracy at all three levels. These findings empirically validate the Contravariance Principle and provide practical guidance for researchers seeking to tune the variability of RNN solutions, either to uncover shared neural mechanisms or to model the individual variability observed in biological systems. This work provides a principled framework for quantifying and controlling solution degeneracy in task-trained RNNs, offering new tools for building more interpretable and biologically grounded models of neural computation.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Military AI Needs Technically-Informed Regulation to Safeguard AI Research and its Applications

Riley Simmons-Edler
Jean Dong
Paul Lushenko
Kanaka Rajan
Ryan Badman

Military weapon systems and command-and-control infrastructure augmented by artificial intelligence (AI) have seen rapid development and deployment in recent years. However, the sociotechnical impacts of AI on combat systems, military decision-making, and the norms of warfare have been understudied. We focus on a specific subset of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) that use AI for targeting or battlefield decisions. We refer to this subset as AI-powered lethal autonomous weapon systems (AI-LAWS) and argue that they introduce novel risks—including unanticipated escalation, poor reliability in unfamiliar environments, and erosion of human oversight—all of which threaten both military effectiveness and the openness of AI research. These risks cannot be addressed by high-level policy alone; effective regulation must be grounded in the technical behavior of AI models. We argue that AI researchers must be involved throughout the regulatory lifecycle. Thus, we propose a clear, behavior-based definition of AI-LAWS—systems that introduce unique risks through their use of modern AI—as a foundation for technically grounded regulation, given that existing frameworks do not distinguish them from conventional LAWS. Using this definition, we propose several technically-informed policy directions and invite greater participation from the AI research community in military AI policy discussions.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

POCO: Scalable Neural Forecasting through Population Conditioning

Yu Duan
Hamza Chaudhry
Misha B Ahrens
Christopher Harvey
Matthew G Perich
Karl Deisseroth
Kanaka Rajan

Predicting future neural activity is a core challenge in modeling brain dynamics, with applications ranging from scientific investigation to closed-loop neurotechnology. While recent models of population activity emphasize interpretability and behavioral decoding, neural forecasting—particularly across multi-session, spontaneous recordings—remains underexplored. We introduce POCO, a unified forecasting model that combines a lightweight univariate forecaster with a population-level encoder to capture both neuron-specific and brain-wide dynamics. Trained across five calcium imaging datasets spanning zebrafish, mice, and C. elegans, POCO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy at cellular resolution in spontaneous behaviors. After pre-training, POCO rapidly adapts to new recordings with minimal fine-tuning. Notably, POCO's learned unit embeddings recover biologically meaningful structure—such as brain region clustering—without any anatomical labels. Our comprehensive analysis reveals several key factors influencing performance, including context length, session diversity, and preprocessing. Together, these results position POCO as a scalable and adaptable approach for cross-session neural forecasting and offer actionable insights for future model design. By enabling accurate, generalizable forecasting models of neural dynamics across individuals and species, POCO lays the groundwork for adaptive neurotechnologies and large-scale efforts for neural foundation models. Code is available at https: //github. com/yuvenduan/POCO.

PDF Details

ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Position: AI-Powered Autonomous Weapons Risk Geopolitical Instability and Threaten AI Research

Riley Simmons-Edler
Ryan Paul Badman
Shayne Longpre
Kanaka Rajan

The recent embrace of machine learning (ML) in the development of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) creates serious risks to geopolitical stability and the free exchange of ideas in AI research. This topic has received comparatively little attention of late compared to risks stemming from superintelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI), but requires fewer assumptions about the course of technological development and is thus a nearer-future issue. ML is already enabling the substitution of AWS for human soldiers in many battlefield roles, reducing the upfront human cost, and thus political cost, of waging offensive war. In the case of peer adversaries, this increases the likelihood of "low intensity" conflicts which risk escalation to broader warfare. In the case of non-peer adversaries, it reduces the domestic blowback to wars of aggression. This effect can occur regardless of other ethical issues around the use of military AI such as the risk of civilian casualties, and does not require any superhuman AI capabilities. Further, the military value of AWS raises the specter of an AI-powered arms race and the misguided imposition of national security restrictions on AI research. Our goal in this paper is to raise awareness among the public and ML researchers on the near-future risks posed by full or near-full autonomy in military technology, and we provide regulatory suggestions to mitigate these risks. We call upon AI policy experts and the defense AI community in particular to embrace transparency and caution in their development and deployment of AWS to avoid the negative effects on global stability and AI research that we highlight here.

Details

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Curriculum learning as a tool to uncover learning principles in the brain

Daniel R. Kepple
Rainer Engelken
Kanaka Rajan

We present a novel approach to use curricula to identify principles by which a system learns. Previous work in curriculum learning has focused on how curricula can be designed to improve learning of a model on particular tasks. We consider the inverse problem: what can a curriculum tell us about how a learning system acquired a task? Using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and models of common experimental neuroscience tasks, we demonstrate that curricula can be used to differentiate learning principles using target-based and a representation-based loss functions as use cases. In particular, we compare the performance of RNNs using target-based learning rules versus those using representational learning rules on three different curricula in the context of two tasks. We show that the learned state-space trajectories of RNNs trained by these two learning rules under all curricula tested are indistinguishable. However, by comparing learning times during different curricula, we can disambiguate the learning rules and challenge traditional approaches of interrogating learning systems. Although all animals in neuroscience lab settings are trained by curriculum-based procedures called shaping, almost no behavioral or neural data are collected or published on the relative successes or training times under different curricula. Our results motivate the systematic collection and curation of data during shaping by demonstrating curriculum learning in RNNs as a tool to probe and differentiate learning principles used by biological systems, over conventional statistical analyses of learned state spaces.

Details

NeurIPS Conference 2010 Conference Paper

Inferring Stimulus Selectivity from the Spatial Structure of Neural Network Dynamics

Kanaka Rajan
L Abbott
Haim Sompolinsky

How are the spatial patterns of spontaneous and evoked population responses related? We study the impact of connectivity on the spatial pattern of fluctuations in the input-generated response of a neural network, by comparing the distribution of evoked and intrinsically generated activity across the different units. We develop a complementary approach to principal component analysis in which separate high-variance directions are typically derived for each input condition. We analyze subspace angles to compute the difference between the shapes of trajectories corresponding to different network states, and the orientation of the low-dimensional subspaces that driven trajectories occupy within the full space of neuronal activity. In addition to revealing how the spatiotemporal structure of spontaneous activity affects input-evoked responses, these methods can be used to infer input selectivity induced by network dynamics from experimentally accessible measures of spontaneous activity (e. g. from voltage- or calcium-sensitive optical imaging experiments). We conclude that the absence of a detailed spatial map of afferent inputs and cortical connectivity does not limit our ability to design spatially extended stimuli that evoke strong responses.

PDF Details