Leveraging Dale's Principle as an Inductive Bias in Recurrent Neural Networks

Overview & Synopsis

One of the fundamental differences between biological neural networks and artificial neural networks (ANNs) is that biological neurons obey Dale's principle: each neuron projects either exclusively excitatory or exclusively inhibitory outputs. While this constraint is central to biological circuits, previous attempts to impose Dale's principle in ANNs have often led to training instability or degraded performance. In this work, we introduce EISep RNN, a recurrent neural network architecture that implements Dale's principle through a learnable excitatory-inhibitory separation. Across a series of learning settings, including multi-task learning, continual learning, and reinforcement learning, EISep achieves more stable training dynamics, competitive or improved performance, and sparser, more modular connectivity than vanilla RNNs and previous Dale-constrained models. EISep also exhibits stable and informative latent dynamics. These results establish Dale's principle as a biologically grounded and computationally effective inductive bias for recurrent neural networks.