VSAONLINE. SEASON 12. January 19, 20:00GMT. Sven Krausse.
Evgeny Osipov
Dear all,
Welcome to the first talk of Season 12 on VSAONLINE. Sven Krausse from Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany will give a talk
” A Grid Cell-Inspired Structured Vector Algebra for Cognitive Maps.”
Date: January 19, 2026
Time: 20:00 GMT
Zoom: https://ltu-se.zoom.us/j/65564790287
Abstract: The entorhinal-hippocampal formation is the mammalian brain's navigation system, encoding both physical and abstract spaces via grid cells. While this system is well-studied in neuroscience, and its efficiency makes it attractive for robotics and machine learning, integrating continuous spatial computations with abstract cognitive processing remains a challenge. Current approaches, such as Continuous Attractor Networks (CANs), successfully model grid cells for physical space but struggle to unify this with abstract data.
Here, we bridge this gap by proposing a mechanistic model for versatile information processing inspired by CANs and Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs). The novel Grid-Cell VSA (GC-VSA) model employs a spatially structured encoding scheme with 3D neuronal modules. These modules mimic the discrete scales and orientations of biological grid cells, reproducing their characteristic hexagonal receptive fields.
In experiments, the model demonstrates versatility across three distinct tasks: (1) accurate path integration for tracking locations, (2) spatio-temporal representation for querying object locations and temporal relations, and (3) symbolic reasoning using family trees to test hierarchical relationships. Finally, we discuss ongoing work utilizing the GC-VSA to model "visually guided path integration". By leveraging the framework’s ability to bind continuous spatial variables with categorical variables (e.g., Object IDs), we demonstrate how visual cues can robustly anchor the grid cell code to the physical environment.
Evgeny Osipov
/**SORRY FOR POSSIBLE SPAMMING. There was a cancellation mail circling around – plese IGNORE IT. THE FIRST WEBBINAR BY SVEN KRAUSSE WILL TAKE PLACE TOMORROW AS PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED. **/