Brain-Like Processing Pathways Form in Models With Heterogeneous Experts

The brain is made up of a vast set of heterogeneous regions that dynamically organize into pathways as a function of task demands. Examples of such pathways can be seen in the interactions between cortical and subcortical networks during learning. This raises the question of how exactly brain regions organize into these dynamic groups. In this work, we use an extension of the Heterogeneous Mixture-of-Experts architecture, to show that heterogeneous regions do not form processing pathways by themselves, implying that the brain likely implements specific constraints which result in reliable formation of pathways. We identify three biologically relevant inductive biases that encourage pathway formation: a routing cost imposed on the use of more complex regions, a scaling factor that reduces this cost when task performance is low, and randomized expert dropout. When comparing our resulting Mixture-of-Pathways model with the brain, we observe that the artificial pathways match how the brain uses cortical and subcortical systems to learn and solve tasks of varying difficulty. In summary, we introduce a novel framework for investigating how the brain forms task-specific pathways through inductive biases which may make Mixture-of-Experts architectures in general more adaptive.

@article{cook2025_2506.02813,
  title={ Brain-Like Processing Pathways Form in Models With Heterogeneous Experts },
  author={ Jack Cook and Danyal Akarca and Rui Ponte Costa and Jascha Achterberg },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.02813},
  year={ 2025 }
}