Behavioral Time Scale Synaptic Plasticity (BTSP) endows binding of distributed representations with flexible retrieval options

Human reasoning depends on reusing pieces of information by binding them together in new ways, thereby “making infinite uses of finite means” (Alexander von Humboldt). Needed for that is a binding mechanism that enables fast composition and decomposition of tokens of information. Binding can easily be implemented in symbolic computations through parentheses and ordering of symbols. But it is a highly nontrivial operation for distributed representations, where the tokens are encoded by activity patterns in large neural networks or large language models, or more abstractly, by a high dimensional vector. Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) provide partial solutions, but are lacking the flexibility of the brain in information retrieval, e.g. retrieving the tokens from a composed representation or retrieval of a composed representation by just providing some tokens as a cue. We show that a mechanism which the brain employs for binding distributed representations, Behavioral Time Scale Synaptic Plasticity (BTSP), overcomes these deficiencies. In particular, it combines binding with attractor features that make information retrieval substantially more flexible and robust. We evaluate its performance on various applications, including encoding and decoding complex visual scenes and hierarchical binding. We also show that it enhances models for natural language processing and abstract brain computation. BTSP-based binding only requires binary synaptic weights and simple local synaptic plasticity, and can therefore easily be implemented through in-memory computing or other innovative designs for energy-efficient AI implementations.