The Fly's Trick: Sparse Expansion as a Learning Prior
A small MNIST experiment inspired by the fly olfactory system: expand into many sparse random features, keep only a tiny active tag, and train a simple local readout.
Research notes
Small mechanisms, inspectable experiments.
Public notes on biologically inspired learning rules and toy systems where the mechanism is simple enough to see.
Sparse coding
Forward-only learning
Local plasticity
MNIST toys