MA-Net: Rethinking Neural Unit in the Light of Astrocytes

The artificial neuron (N-N) model-based networks have accomplished extraordinary success for various vision tasks. However, as a simplification of the mammal neuron model, their structure is locked during training, resulting in overfitting and over-parameters. The astrocyte, newly explored by biologists, can adaptively modulate neuronal communication by inserting itself between neurons. The communication, between the astrocyte and neuron, is bidirectional and shows the potential to alleviate issues raised by unidirectional communication in the N-N model. In this paper, we first elaborate on the artificial Multi-Astrocyte-Neuron (MA-N) model, which enriches the functionality of the artificial neuron model. Our MA-N model is formulated at both astrocyte- and neuron-level that mimics the bidirectional communication with temporal and joint mechanisms. Then, we construct the MA-Net network with the MA-N model, whose neural connections can be continuously and adaptively modulated during training. Experiments show that our MA-Net advances new state-of-the-art on multiple tasks while significantly reducing its parameters by connection optimization.