Pulvinar pathways as skip connections in deep neural networks for vision

IntroductionThe pulvinar is thought to regulate cortico-cortical communication through transthalamic pathways, yet the computational consequences of such modulation remain unclear.MethodsA minimal pulvinar-inspired long-range skip pathway in a hierarchical convolutional vision model was tested, implemented as a learned projection from early to late feature maps coupled with a gain-controlled gating mechanism. The architecture was evaluated in two complementary experiments: CIFAR-10 categorizatio