prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What factors control the reliance of artificial organisms on plasticity?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 1: Paper Info

Title: Environmental variability and network structure determine the optimal plasticity mechanisms in embodied agents
Publish Date: Unkown
Author List: Sina Khajehabdollahi (from Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen)

Figure

Figure2: An outline of the network controlling the foraging agent The sensor layer receives inputs at each time step (the ingredients of the nearest food), which are processed by the plastic layer in the same way as the static sensory network, Fig 1 The output of that network is given as input to the motor network, along with the distance d and angle α to the nearest food, the current velocity v, and energy E of the agent These signals are processed through two hidden layers to the final output of motor commands as the linear and angular acceleration of the agent
Figure4: The evolved parameters θ = (θ 1 ,      , θ 8 ) of the plasticity rule for the reward prediction (a ) and the decision (b ) tasks, for a variety of parameters (p tr = 0 01, d e ∈ 0, 0 1,      , 1, and σ ∈ 0, 0 1,      , 1 in all 100 combinations) Despite the relatively small difference between the tasks, the evolved learning rules differ considerably For visual guidance, the lines connect θs from the same run 
Figure5: a The trajectory of an agent (blue line) in the 2D environment A well-trained agent will approach and consume food with positive values (green dots) and avoid negative food (red dots) b The learning rate of the plastic sensory network eta p grows with the distance between environments d e c  and decreases with the frequency of environmental change d The fitness of an agent (measured as the total food consumed over its lifetime) increases over generations of the EA for both the scalar and binary readouts in the sensory network e The Pearson correlation coefficient of an evolved agent's weights with the ingredient value vector of the current environment (E 1 -blue, E 2 -red) In this example, the agent's weights are anti-correlated with its environment, which is not an issue for performance since the motor network can interpret the inverted signs of food 

abstract

The evolutionary balance between innate and learned behaviors is highly intricate, and different organisms have found different solutions to this problem  We hypothesize that the emergence and exact form of learning behaviors is naturally connected with the statistics of environmental fluctuations and tasks an organism needs to solve 
Here, we study how different aspects of simulated environments shape an evolved synaptic plasticity rule in static and moving artificial agents  We demonstrate that environmental fluctuation and uncertainty control the reliance of artificial organisms on plasticity  Interestingly, the form of the emerging plasticity rule is additionally determined by the details of the task the artificial organisms are aiming to solve 
Moreover, we show that coevolution between static connectivity and interacting plasticity mechanisms in distinct sub-networks changes the function and form of the emerging plasticity rules in embodied agents performing a foraging task  One of the defining features of living organisms is their ability to adapt to their environment and incorporate new information to modify their behavior 
It is unclear how the ability to learn first evolved , but its utility appears evident  Natural environments are too complex for all the necessary information to be hardcoded genetically and more importantly, they keep changing during an organism's lifetime in ways that cannot be anticipated ;   The link between learning and environmental uncertainty and fluctuation has been extensively demonstrated in both natural ; , and artificial environments  
Nevertheless, the ability to learn does not come without costs  For the capacity to learn to be beneficial in evolutionary terms, a costly nurturing period is often required, a phenomenon observed in both biological , and artificial organisms   Additionally, it has been shown that in some complex environments, hardcoded behaviors may be superior to learned ones given limits in the agent's lifetime and envi-ronmental uncertainty ; ;  
The theoretical investigation of the optimal balance between learned and innate behaviors in natural and artificial systems goes back several decades  However, it has recently found also a wide range of applications in applied AI systems ;   Most AI systems are trained for specific tasks, and have no need for modification after their training has been completed 
Still, technological advances and the necessity to solve broad families of tasks make discussions about life-like AI systems relevant to a wide range of potential application areas  Thus the idea of open-ended AI agents that can continually interact with and adapt to changing environments has become particularly appealing 
Many different approaches for introducing lifelong learning in artificial agents have been proposed  Some of them draw direct inspiration from actual biological systems ;   Among them, the most biologically plausible solution is to equip artificial neural networks with some local neural plasticity , similar to the large variety of synaptic plasticity mechanisms ; ; that performs the bulk of the learning in the brains of living organisms  
The artificial plasticity mechanisms can be optimized to modify the connectivity of the artificial neural networks toward solving a particular task  The optimization can use a variety of approaches, most commonly evolutionary computation  The idea of meta-learning or optimizing synaptic plasticity rules to perform specific functions has been recently established as an engineering tool that can compete with stateof-the-art machine learning algorithms on various complex tasks ; ; Pedersen and Risi (2021);  
Additionally, it can be used to reverse engineer actual plasticity mechanisms found in biological neural networks and uncover their functions ;   Here, we study the effect that different factors (environ-arXiv:2303 06734v1 [q-bio NC] 12 Mar 2023 mental fluctuation and reliability, task complexity) have on the form of evolved functional reward-modulated plasticity rules 
We investigate the evolution of plasticity rules in static, single-layer simple networks  Then we increase the complexity by switching to moving agents performing a complex foraging task  In both cases, we study the impact of different environmental parameters on the form of the evolved plasticity mechanisms and the interaction of learned and static network connectivity 
Interestingly, we find that different environmental conditions and different combinations of static and plastic connectivity have a very large impact on the resulting plasticity rules  We imagine an agent who must forage to survive in an environment presenting various types of complex food particles  Each food particle is composed of various amounts and combinations of N ingredients that can have positive (food) or negative (poison) values 
The value of a food particle is a weighted sum of its ingredients  To predict the reward value of a given resource, the agent must learn the values of these ingredients by interacting with the environment  The priors could be generated by genetic memory, but the exact values are subject to change  To introduce environmental variability, we stochastically change the values of the ingredients 
More precisely, we define two ingredient-value distributions E 1 and E 2 and switch between them, with probability p tr for every time step  We control how (dis)similar the environments are by parametrically setting E 2 = (1 − 2d e )E 1 , with d e ∈ [0, 1] serving as a distance proxy for the environments; when d e = 0, the environment remains unchanged, and when d e = 1 the value of each ingredient fully reverses when the environmental transition happens 
For simplicity, we take values of the ingredients in E 1 equally spaced between -1 and 1 (for the visualization, see Fig  )  The static agent receives passively presented food as a vector of ingredients and can assess its compound value using the linear summation of its sensors with the (learned or evolved) weights, see Fig   
The network consists of N sensory neurons that are projecting to a single post-synaptic neuron  At each time step, an input X t = (x 1 ,       , x N ) is presented, were the value x i , i ∈ {1,       , N } represents the quantity of the ingredient i  We draw x i independently form a uniform distribution on the [0, 1] interval (x i ∼ U (0, 1)) 
The value of each ingredient w c i is determined by the environment (E 1 or E 2 )  The postsynaptic neuron outputs a prediction of the food X t value as y t = g(W X T t )  Throughout the paper, g will be either the identity function, in which case the prediction neuron is linear, or a step-function; however, it could be any other nonlinearity, such as a sigmoid or ReLU 
After outputting the prediction, the neuron receives feedback in the form of the real value of the input R t   The real value is computed as R t = W c X T t + ξ, where W c = (w c 1 ,       , w c N ) is the actual value of the ingredients, and ξ is a term summarizing the noise of reward and sensing system ξ ∼ N (0, σ) 
Figure : An outline of the static agent's network  The sensor layer receives inputs representing the quantity of each ingredient of a given food at each time step  The agent computes the prediction of the food's value y t and is then given the true value R t ; it finally uses this information in the plasticity rule to update the weight matrix 
For the evolutionary adjustment of the agent's parameters, the loss of the static agent is the sum of the mean squared errors (MSE) between its prediction y t and the reward R t over the lifetime of the agent  The agent's initial weights are set to the average of the two ingredient value distributions, which is the optimal initial value for the case of symmetric switching of environments that we consider here 
As a next step, we incorporate the sensory network of static agents into embodied agents that can move around in an environment scattered with food  To this end, we merge the static agent's network with a second, non-plastic motor network that is responsible for controlling the motion of the agent in the environment 
Specifically, the original plastic network now provides the agent with information about the value of the nearest food  The embodied agent has additional sensors for the distance from the nearest food, the angle between the current velocity and the nearest food direction, its own velocity, and its own energy level (sum of consumed food values) 
These inputs are processed by two hidden layers (of 30 and 15 neurons) with tanh activation  The network's outputs are angular and linear acceleration, Fig    The embodied agents spawn in a 2D space with periodic boundary conditions along with a number of food particles that are selected such that the mean of the food value distribution is ∼ 0  An agent can eat food by approaching it sufficiently closely, and each time a food particle is eaten, it is The sensor layer receives inputs at each time step (the ingredients of the nearest food), which are processed by the plastic layer in the same way as the static sensory network, Fig   
The output of that network is given as input to the motor network, along with the distance d and angle α to the nearest food, the current velocity v, and energy E of the agent  These signals are processed through two hidden layers to the final output of motor commands as the linear and angular acceleration of the agent re-spawned with the same value somewhere randomly on the grid (following the setup of ) 
After 5000 time steps, the cumulative reward of the agent (the sum of the values of all the food it consumed) is taken as its fitness  During the evolutionary optimization, the parameters for both the motor network (connections) and plastic network (learning rule parameters) are co-evolved, and so agents must simultaneously learn to move and discriminate good/bad food 
Reward-modulated plasticity is one of the most promising explanations for biological credit assignment   In our network, the plasticity rule that updates the weights of the linear sensor network is a rewardmodulated rule which is parameterized as a linear combination of the input, the output, and the reward at each time step:
Additionally, after each plasticity step, the weights are normalized by mean subtraction, an important step for the stabilization of Hebbian-like plasticity rules   We use a genetic algorithm to optimize the learning rate η p and amplitudes of different terms θ = (θ 1 ,       , θ 8 )  The successful plasticity rule after many food presentations must converge to a weight vector that predicts the correct food values (or allows the agent to correctly decide whether to eat a food or avoid it) 
To have comparable results, we divide θ = (θ 1 ,       , θ 8 ) by We then multiply the learning rate η p with θ max to maintain the rule's evolved form unchanged, η norm p = η p • θ max   In the following, we always use normalized η p and θ, omitting norm   To evolve the plasticity rule and the moving agents' motor networks, we use a simple genetic algorithm with elitism  
The agents' parameters are initialized at random (drawn from a Gaussian distribution), then the sensory network is trained by the plasticity rule and finally, the agents are evaluated  After each generation, the bestperforming agents (top 10 % of the population size) are selected and copied into the next generation 
The remaining 90 % of the generation is repopulated with mutated copies of the best-performing agents  We mutate agents by adding independent Gaussian noise (σ = 0 1) to its parameters  To start with, we consider a static agent whose goal is to identify the value of presented food correctly  The static reward-prediction network quickly evolves the parameters of the learning rule, successfully solving the prediction task 
We first look at the evolved learning rate η p , which determines how fast (if at all) the network's weight vector is updated during the lifetime of the agents  We identify three factors that control the learning rate parameter the EA converges to: the distance between the environments, the noisiness of the reward, and the rate of environmental transition 
The first natural factor is the distance d e between the two environments, with a larger distance requiring a higher learning rate, Fig    This is an expected result since the convergence time to the "correct" weights is highly dependent on the initial conditions  If an agent is born at a point very close to optimality, which naturally happens if the environments are similar, the distance it needs to traverse on the fitness landscape is small 
Therefore it can afford to have a small learning rate, which leads to a more stable convergence and is not affected by noise  A second parameter that impacts the learning rate is the variance of the rewards  The reward an agent receives for the plasticity step contains a noise term ξ that is drawn from a zero mean Gaussian distribution with standard deviation σ 
This parameter controls the unreliability of the agent's sensory system, i e , higher σ means that the information the agent gets about the value of the foods it consumes cannot be fully trusted to reflect the actual value of the foods  As σ increases, the learning rate η p decreases, which means that the more unreliable an environment becomes, the less an agent relies on plasticity to update its weights, Fig   
Indeed for some combinations of relatively small distance d e and high reward variance σ, the EA converges to a learning rate of η p ≈ 0  This means that the agent opts to have no adaptation during its lifetime and remain at the mean of the two environments  It is an optimal solution when the expected loss due to ignoring the environmental transitions is, on average, lower than the loss the plastic network will incur by learning via the (often misleading because of the high σ) environmental cues 
A final factor that affects the learning rate the EA will converge to is the frequency of environmental change during an agent's lifetime  Since the environmental change is modeled as a simple, two-state Markov process (Fig  ), the control parameter is the transition probability p tr   When keeping everything else the same, the learning rate rapidly rises as we increase the transition probability from 0, and after reaching a peak, it begins to decline slowly, eventually reaching zero (Fig  ) 
This means that when environmental transition is very rare, agents opt for a very low learning rate, allowing a slow and stable convergence to an environment-appropriate weight vector that leads to very low losses while the agent remains in that environment  As the rate of environmental transition increases, faster learning is required to speed up convergence in order to exploit the (comparatively shorter) stays in each environment 
Finally, as the environmental transition becomes too fast, the agents opt for slower or even no learning, which keeps them ) and the decision (b ) tasks, for a variety of parameters (p tr = 0 01, d e ∈ 0, 0 1,       , 1, and σ ∈ 0, 0 1,       , 1 in all 100 combinations)  Despite the relatively small difference between the tasks, the evolved learning rules differ considerably 
For visual guidance, the lines connect θs from the same run  near the middle of the two environments, ensuring that the average loss of the two environments is minimal (Fig  )  The form of the evolved learning rule depends on the task: Decision vs  Prediction The plasticity parameters θ = (θ 1 ,       , θ 8 ) for the rewardprediction task converge on approximately the same point, regardless of the environmental parameters (Fig  ) 
In particular, θ 3 → 1, θ 5 → −1, θ i → 0 for all other i, and thus the learning rule converges to: Since by definition y t = g(W t X T t ) = W t X T t (g(x) = x in this experiment) and R t = W c X T t + ξ we get: Thus the distribution of ∆W t converges to a distribution with mean 0 and variance depending on η p and σ and W converges to W c  
So this learning rule will match the agent's weight vector with the vector of ingredient values in the environment  We examine the robustness of the learning rule the EA discovers by considering a slight modification of our task  Instead of predicting the expected food value, the agent now needs to decide whether to eat the presented food or not 
This is done by introducing a step-function nonlinearity (g(x) = 1 if x ≥ 1 and 0 otherwise)  Then the output y(t) is computed as: Instead of the MSE loss between prediction and actual value, the fitness of the agent is now defined as the sum of the food values it chose to consume (by giving y t = 1)  Besides these two changes, the setup of the experiments remains exactly the same 
The qualitative relation between η p and parameters of environment d e , σ and p tr is preserved in the changed experiment  However, the resulting learning rule is significantly different (Fig  )  The evolution converges to the following learning rule: In both cases, the rule has the form ∆W t = η p X t [α y R t + β y ] 
Thus, the ∆W t is positive or negative depending on whether the reward R t is above or below a threshold (γ = −β y /α y ) that depends on the output decision of the network (y t = 0 or 1)  Both learning rules (for the reward-prediction and decision tasks) have a clear Hebbian form (coordination of preand post-synaptic activity) and use the incoming reward signal as a threshold 
These similarities indicate some common organizing principles of reward-modulated learning rules, but their significant differences highlight the sensitivity of the optimization process to task details  We now turn to the moving embodied agents in the 2D environment  To optimize these agents, both the motor network's connections and the sensory network's plasticity parameters evolve simultaneously 
Since the motor network is initially random and the agent has to move to find food, the number of interactions an agent experiences in its lifetime can be small, slowing down the learning  However, having the larger motor network also has benefits for evolution because it allows the output of the plastic network to be read out and transformed in different ways, resulting in a broad set of solutions 
The fitness of an agent (measured as the total food consumed over its lifetime) increases over generations of the EA for both the scalar and binary readouts in the sensory network  e  The Pearson correlation coefficient of an evolved agent's weights with the ingredient value vector of the current environment (E 1 -blue, E 2 -red) 
In this example, the agent's weights are anti-correlated with its environment, which is not an issue for performance since the motor network can interpret the inverted signs of food  The agents can solve the task effectively by evolving a functional motor network and a plasticity rule that converges to interpretable weights (Fig  ) 
After ∼ 100 evolutionary steps (Fig  ), the agents can learn the ingredient value distribution using the plastic network and reliably move towards foods with positive values while avoiding the ones with negative values  We compare the dependence of the moving and the static agents on the parameters of the environment: d e and the state transition probability p tr  
At first, in order to simplify the experiment, we set the transition probability to 0, but fixed the initial weights to be the average of E 1 and E 2 , while the real state is E 2   In this experiment, the distance between states d e indicates twice the distance between the agent's initial weights and the optimal weights (the environment's ingredient values) since the agent is initialized at the mean of the two environment distributions 
Same as for the static agent, the learning rate increases with the distance d e (Fig  )  Then, we examine the effect of the environmental transition probability p tr on the evolved learning rate η p   In order for an agent to get sufficient exposure to each environment, we scale down the probability p tr from the equivalent experiment for the static agents 
We find that as the probability of transition increases, the evolved learning rate η p decreases (Fig  )  This fits with the larger trend for the static agent, although there is a clear difference when it comes to the increase for very small transition probabil-ities that were clearly identifiable in the static but not the moving agents 
This could be due to much sparser data and possibly the insufficiently long lifetime of the moving agent (the necessity of scaling makes direct comparisons difficult)  Nevertheless, overall we see that the associations observed in the static agents between environmental distance d e and transition probability p tr and the evolved learning rate η p are largely maintained in the moving agents 
Still, more data would be needed to make any conclusive assertions about the exact effect of these environmental parameters on the emerging plasticity mechanisms  A crucial difference between the static and the moving agents is the function the plasticity has to perform  While in the static agents, the plasticity has to effectively identify the exact value distribution of the environment in order to produce accurate predictions, in the embodied agents, the plasticity has to merely produce a representation of the environment that the motor network can evolve to interpret adequately enough to make decisions about which food to consume 
To illustrate the difference, we plot the Pearson correlation coefficient between an agent's weights and the ingredient values of the environment it is moving in (Fig  )  We use the correlation instead of the MSE loss (which we used for the static agents in Fig  ) because the amplitude of the vector varies a lot for different agents and meaningful The evolved parameters of moving agents' plasticity rule for the g(s) = x, identity (a ) and the step function (Eq 
4) (b ) sensory networks (the environmental parameters here are d e ∈ [0, 1], σ = 0 and p tr = 0 001)  The step function (binary output) network evolved a more structured plasticity rule (e g , θ 3 > 0 for all realizations) than the linear network  Moreover, the learned weights for the identity network (c ) have higher variance and correlate significantly less with the environment's ingredient distribution compared to the learned weights for the thresholded network (d )
conclusions cannot be drawn from the MSE loss  For many agents, the learned weights are consistently anti-correlated with the actual ingredient values (an example of such an agent is shown in Fig  )  This means that the output of the sensory network will have the opposite sign from the actual food value 
While in the static network, this would lead to very bad predictions and high loss, in the foraging task, these agents perform exactly as well as the ones where the weights and ingredients values are positively correlated, since the motor network can simply learn to move towards food for which it gets a negative instead of a positive sensory input 
This additional step of the output of the plastic network going through the motor network before producing any behavior has a strong effect on the plasticity rules that the embodied agents evolve  Specifically, if we look at the emerging rules the top performing agents have evolved (Fig  ), it becomes clear that, unlike the very well-structured rules of the static agents (Fig  ), there is now virtually no discernible pattern or structure 
The difference becomes even clearer if we look at the learned weights (at the end of a simulation) of the best-performing agents (Fig  )  While there is some correlation with the environment's ingredient value distribution, the variance is very large, and they do not seem to converge on the "correct" values in any way 
This is to some extent expected since, unlike the static agents where the network's output has to be exactly correct, driving the evolution of rules that converge to the precise environmental distribution, in the embodied networks, the bulk of the processing is done by the motor network which can evolve to interpret the scalar value of the sensory network's output in a variety of ways 
Thus, as long as the sensory network's plasticity rule co-evolves with the motor network, any plasticity rule that learns to produce consistent information about the value of encountered food can potentially be selected  To further test this assumption, we introduce a bottleneck of information propagation between the sensory and motor networks by using a step-function nonlinearity on the output of the sensory network (Eq 
4)  Similarly to the decision task of the static network, the output of the sensory network now becomes binary  This effectively reduces the flow of information from the sensory to the motor network, forcing the sensory network to consistently decide whether food should be consumed (with the caveat that the motor network can still interpret the binary sign in either of two ways, either consuming food marked with 1 or the ones marked with 0 by the sensory network) 
The agents perform equally well in this variation of the task as before (Fig  ), but now, the evolved plasticity rules seem to be more structured (Fig  )  Moreover, the variance of the learned weights in the bestperforming agents is significantly reduced (Fig  ), which indicates that the bottleneck in the sensory network is in-creasing selection pressure for rules that learn the environment's food distribution accurately 
We find that different sources of variability have a strong impact on the extent to which evolving agents will develop neuronal plasticity mechanisms for adapting to their environment  A diverse environment, a reliable sensory system, and a rate of environmental change that is neither too large nor too small are necessary conditions for an agent to be able to effectively adapt via synaptic plasticity 
Additionally, we find that minor variations of the task an agent has to solve or the parametrization of the network can give rise to significantly different plasticity rules  Our results partially extend to embodied artificial agents performing a foraging task  We show that environmental variability also pushes the development of plasticity in such agents 
Still, in contrast to the static agents, we find that the interaction of a static motor network with a plastic sensory network gives rise to a much greater variety of wellfunctioning learning rules  We propose a potential cause of this degeneracy; as the relatively complex motor network is allowed to read out and process the outputs from the plastic network, any consistent information coming out of these outputs can be potentially interpreted in a behaviorally useful way 
Reducing the information the motor network can extract from the sensory system significantly limits learning rule variability  Our findings on the effect of environmental variability concur with the findings of previous studies that have identified the constraints that environmental variability places on the evolutionary viability of learning behaviors 
We extend these findings in a mechanistic model which uses a biologically plausible learning mechanism (synaptic plasticity)  We show how a simple evolutionary algorithm can optimize the different parameters of a simple reward-modulated plasticity rule for solving simple prediction and decision tasks 
Reward-modulated plasticity has been extensively studied as a plausible mechanism for credit assignment in the brain ; ; and has found several applications in artificial intelligence and robotics tasks ;   Here, we demonstrate how such rules can be very well-tuned to take into account different environmental parameters and produce optimal behavior in simple systems 
Additionally, we demonstrate how the co-evolution of plasticity and static functional connectivity in different subnetworks fundamentally changes the evolutionary pressures on the resulting plasticity rules, allowing for greater diversity in the form of the learning rule and the resulting learned connectivity 
Several studies have demonstrated how, in biological networks, synaptic plasticity heavily interacts with and is driven by network topology   Moreover, it has been recently demonstrated that biological plasticity mechanisms are highly redundant in the sense that any observed neural connectivity or recorded activity can be achieved with a variety of distinct, unrelated learning rules  
This observed redundancy of learning rules in biological settings complements our results and suggests that the function of plasticity rules cannot be studied independently of the connectivity and topology of the networks they are acting on  The optimization of functional plasticity in neural networks is a promising research direction both as a means to understand biological learning processes and as a tool for building more autonomous artificial systems 
Our results suggest that reward-modulated plasticity is highly adaptable to different environments and can be incorporated into larger systems that solve complex tasks  This work studies a simplified toy model of neural network learning in stochastic environments  Future work could be built on this basic framework to examine more complex reward distributions and sources of environmental variability 
Moreover, a greater degree of biological realism could be added by studying more plausible network architectures (multiple plastic layers, recurrent and feedback connections) and more sophisticated plasticity rule parametrizations  Additionally, our foraging simulations were constrained by limited computational resources and were far from exhaustive 
Further experiments can investigate environments with different constraints, food distributions, multiple seasons, more complex motor control systems and interactions of those systems with different sensory networks as well as the inclusion of plasticity on the motor parts of the artificial organisms 
Context 3: Paper Info

Title: Compressed quantum error mitigation
Publish Date: 10 May 2023
Author List: Maurits Tepaske (from Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bonn), David Luitz (from Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bonn)

Figure

FIG 3 The out-of-time-ordered correlator C otoc i=L/2,j (t) as a function of the operator position j and time t, for the infinite temperature initial state, for a denoised second-order Trotter supercircuit with Trotter depth Mtrot = 32 and denoiser depth M = 2 We consider evolution times t = 0 5, 1,    , 5, for the periodic L = 14 Heisenberg chain that is affected by two-qubit depolarizing noise with p = 0 01 
FIG  4  The complex eigenvalues λ of the noisy second-order Trotter supercircuit with Mtrot = 16 at time t = 1 (left), the corresponding optimized denoiser with M = 4 (center), and the denoised Trotter supercircuit (right) The Trotter circuit is for a L = 6 Heisenberg model with PBC, and all twoqubit channels are affected by depolarizing noise with p = 0 0046 The unit circle, on which unitary eigenvalues must lie, is shown in black, and the noiseless eigenvalues are shown as blue bars It is evident that the denoiser recovers all the noiseless eigenvalues from the noisy circuit 
FIG  2  The complex eigenvalues λ of the noisy second-order Trotter supercircuit with Mtrot = 16 at time t = 1 (left), the corresponding optimized denoiser with M = 4 (center), and the denoised Trotter supercircuit (right) The Trotter circuit is for a L = 6 Heisenberg model with PBC, and all twoqubit channels are affected by depolarizing noise with p = 0 036 The unit circle, on which unitary eigenvalues must lie, is shown in black, and the noiseless eigenvalues are shown as blue bars It is clear that the denoiser recovers with high accuracy the noiseless eigenvalues from the noisy circuit 
FIG  3  The half-chain channel entanglement entropy S at different two-qubit depolarizing noise strengths p, for a secondorder Trotter supercircuit with Mtrot = 16 and t = 2, for a M = 4 denoiser The Trotter circuit is for a Heisenberg model with PBC of size L = 6 The different curves correspond to the different supercircuits, i e  the noisy supercircuit, the denoiser, the corresponding denoised supercircuit, and the noiseless variant 
FIG  4  The out-of-time-ordered correlator C otoc i=L/2,j (t) as a function of the operator position j and stacked time t, for the infinite temperature initial state, for a denoised secondorder Trotter supercircuit with Trotter depth Mtrot = 32 and denoiser depth M = 2 It is optimized at t = 2 and stacked up to ten times The calculations are for the periodic L = 14 Heisenberg chain that is affected by two-qubit depolarization with p = 0 01 The denoiser is affected by the same noise 
FIG 6 The distribution of the ZZ angle α of M = 2 denoisers (top panels) and M = 8 denoisers (bottom panels), with the lightest color corresponding to the denoiser for the Trotter supercircuit with t = 0 5, and the darkest color with t = 5 As usual, we consider the Heisenberg model on a periodic chain, and second-order Trotter supercircuits with depths Mtrot = 8, 16, 32, 64, which together with the denoiser is affected by a two-qubit depolarizing noise with p = 0 01 The panels are arranged as Mtrot = 8, 16, 32, 64 for top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, respectively 
FIG  7  The sampling overhead γ of the optimized denoisers from Fig  2 of the main text, with denoiser depths M = 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and Trotter depths Mtrot = 8, 16, 32, 64 at times t = 0 5, 1,    , 5, for the Heisenberg model on a chain with PBC affected by two-qubit depolarizing noise with p = 0 01 The panels are arranged as Mtrot = 8, 16, 32, 64 for top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, respectively 
FIG 8 The domain wall magnetization Z dw after evolving a periodic density wall |dw |dw * with the denoised second-order Trotter supercircuits D C from Fig 2of the main text These supercircuits have various Trotter depths Mtrot = 8, 16, 32, 64, denoiser depths M = 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, and evolution times t = 0 5, 1,    , 5, for the periodic L = 14 Heisenberg chain that is affected by two-qubit depolarizing noise of strength p = 0 01 The denoiser is affected by the same noise The non-denoised results are labelled with M = 0 and the noiseless results with p = 0 The panels are arranged as Mtrot = 8, 16, 32, 64 for top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, respectively We see that the denoiser allows us to recover the noiseless behavior 

abstract

We introduce a quantum error mitigation technique based on probabilistic error cancellation to eliminate errors which have accumulated during the application of a quantum circuit  Our approach is based on applying an optimal "denoiser" after the action of a noisy circuit and can be performed with an arbitrary number of extra gates 
The denoiser is given by an ensemble of circuits distributed with a quasiprobability distribution  For a simple noise model, we show that efficient, local denoisers can be found, and we demonstrate their effectiveness for the digital quantum simulation of the time evolution of simple spin chains  Introduction 
-Quantum information processing has been theoretically shown to hold great promises, and quantum algorithms were developed which can in principle achieve an exponential speed-up over their classical counterparts, both for general purpose computing and quantum simulation   However, present day quantum computing prototypes still suffer from significant noise processes which hinder the execution of many potentially groundbreaking quantum algorithms  
Nontrivial quantum algorithms typically require large sequences of quantum gates, each of which introduces dissipation and hence an overall loss of coherence, eventually rendering the results useless  Until quantum error correction becomes practical, quantum error mitigation seems to be more feasible to increase the accuracy of expectation values 
Here the goal is to induce the (partial) cancellation of errors that stem from noisy quantum gates by extending the circuit corresponding to the desired algorithm with an ensemble of gates , sampled from a quasiprobability distribution  The traditional way to accomplish this is with the gatewise method from , where noise is mitigated by inverting the noise channel of each gate separately, i e  the cancellation of errors is performed for each gate on its own 
Here the local noise channel is approximated in a way such that it can be easily inverted analytically, e g  using Pauli twirling   Gates are then sampled from the inverted noise channel by interpreting it as a quasiprobability distribution  Because in this gate-wise approach every noisy gate has to be modified separately, the sign problem is exponentially large in the number of gates, limiting the practicality of the mitigation 
The success of the gate-wise approach resulted in a large body of work concerning these methods , including extensions for simultaneous mitigation of multiple gates by Pauli-twirling entire layers or variationally constructing a mitigating matrix product operator   In principle, errors during the execution of a circuit can propagate and accumulate 
These propagated errors * david luitz@uni-bonn de ≈ C

C

FIG  1  An example of the quantum error mitigation procedure used in this work for the time evolution of the wave function of a spin chain  The ideal second-order Trotter supercircuit C of depth Mtrot = 1 (light blue) is approximated by applying a denoiser D of depth M = 1 (red) to the noisy Trotter supercircuit C (dark blue) 
Because the denoiser is applied after fully executing the noisy Trotter supercircuit, it represents an approximate inverse of the global noise channel with a precision tunable by the depth of the denoiser  can potentially blow up and lead to large errors for the circuit as a whole   Here we introduce a mitigation technique that takes into account the propagation of errors, can be performed with a tunable number of extra gates, and works for non-Clifford local noise channels since the inversion of the accumulated global noise channel is implicit 
We first execute the targeted noisy circuit completely, letting the noise propagate and accumulate, and only afterwards we apply an extra random circuit sampled from a quasiprobability distribution  We call the corresponding ensemble of random circuits a denoiser, and we construct it such that upon averaging the accumulated errors cancel 
Essentially, the denoiser inverts a global noise channel  Since we will construct it as a local brickwall circuit, following the classical preprocessing approach from , we call this compressed quantum error mitigation  Method  -Due to the inevitable coupling of a quantum processor to its environment, every qubit operation is affected by noise 
Therefore, the simplest technique to minimize the impact of the resulting noise is to minimize the number of operations when performing a quantum algorithm  In we showed that many-body time evolution operators can be efficiently compressed into brick-wall circuits with high fidelity per gate  In this Letter, we consider the noise explicitly by treating quantum operations as (generally non-unitary) quantum channels, corresponding to completely positive and trace preserving (CPTP) maps  
For example, instead of a noiseless two-qubit gate G, which acts on a quantum state |ρ in superoperator form as G|ρ = G⊗G * |ρ , we get the noisy channel G = N G, where the noise channel N implements the two-qubit noise   These channels are used to construct a "supercircuit" C = N G i=1 Gi , consisting of N G channels, which is affected by multi-qubit accumulated noise 
This supercircuit encodes an ensemble of circuits   For simplicity, we assume that the noisy channels Gi in each half brickwall layer are lattice inversion and translation invariant, such that we can construct a denoiser with these properties, limiting the number of variational parameters  The purpose of quantum error mitigation is to modify the ensemble of circuits described by C in a way that we can use it to obtain the noiseless expectation values 
In superoperator language, we do this by following the supercircuit C with a denoiser supercircuit D, such that D C is as close to the noiseless supercircuit C = C ⊗ C * as possible  Here C is the target unitary circuit  Because the noise channel N is non-unitary, hence making the supercircuit C non-unitary, we need to use a non-unitary denoiser to retrieve the unitary C 
We illustrate the mitigation procedure in Fig  , where a denoiser with one layer is used to mitigate errors for a second-order Trotter supercircuit with one layer  This circuit architecture is commonly used to simulate the time evolution of a quantum many-body system, until some time t, with controllable precision , and we will use it to benchmark the denoiser 
In practice, we cannot directly implement a supercircuit, and so we have to utilize its interpretation as an ensemble of circuits  Essentially, after executing a shot of the noisy circuit we sample the denoiser and apply it  The goal is to construct the denoiser in a way that averaging over many of its samples cancels the accumulated errors and gives us a good approximation of the noiseless expectation values 
It should be noted that our approach requires more gate applications on the quantum processor than with the gate-wise scheme, since there each sample from the mitigation quasiprobability distribution can be absorbed into the original circuit, whereas our approach increases the circuit depth  We take this into account by imposing the same noise on the denoiser 
Furthermore, within our scheme, the dimensionality of the quasiprobabilistic mitigating ensemble can be controlled, in contrast to the gate-wise approach where it is equal to the gate count  To facilitate the stochastic interpretation we parameterize each two-qubit denoiser channel G i as a sum of CPTP maps, such that we can sample the terms in this sum and execute the sampled gate on the quantum processor 
Concretely, we use a trace preserv-ing sum of a unitary and a non-unitary channel  For the unitary part we take a two-qubit unitary channel U( φ i ) = U ( φ i ) ⊗ U * ( φ i ), with U ( φ i ) a two-qubit unitary gate parameterized by φ i   For this we take the two-qubit ZZ rotation exp(−iα(σ z ⊗ σ z )) with angle α, which can be obtained from native gates on current hardware , and dress it with four general one-qubit unitaries, only two of which are independent if we want a circuit that is space inversion symmetric around every bond 
The resulting gate has 7 real parameters φ i   For the non-unitary part, which is essential because D has to cancel the non-unitary accumulated noise to obtain the noiseless unitary circuit, we use a general onequbit measurement followed by conditional preparation channel M( , with V a general one-qubit unitary and each κ i a 3-dimensional vector, resulting in a real 9-dimensional ζ i  
This yields the two-qubit correlated measurement M( With these parts we construct the parameterization with coefficients η i ∈ R that satisfy η 0 + η 1 = 1 because G i is trace preserving  Note that here the tensor product symbol corresponds to combining two one-qubit channels to make a two-qubit channel, whereas in most of the paper it is used to link the column and row indices of a density matrix 
We construct the denoiser from the noisy channels Gi = N G i   With this parameterization one denoiser channel has 17 independent real parameters, such that a denoiser of depth M , i e  consisting of M brickwall layers, has 34M real parameters (we use one unique channel per half brickwall layer)  For reference, a general channel has 544M parameters 
To determine the mitigated expectation values we use the full expression where |ρ 0 is the initial state and |1 is the vectorized identity operator on the full Hilbert space  To evaluate this on a quantum processor, we use the stochastic interpretation of (1) to resample   In particular, from each channel (1) we get a unitary with probability p 0 = |η 0 |/γ and a measurement followed by conditional preparation with probability p 1 = |η 1 |/γ 
Here γ = |η 0 | + |η 1 | is the sampling overhead, which characterizes the magnitude of the sign problem from negative η i   For quasiprobability distributions, i e  with γ > 1, every denoiser sample has an extra sign sgn(η) = N G g=1 sgn(η g ), 2  The normalized distance between the denoised Trotter supercircuit D C and the noiseless Trotter supercircuit C (top panels), at evolution times t = 0 5, 1,    , 5, and the twopoint z-spin correlator C zz i=L/2,j=L/2 (t) of a spin on the middle site at times 0 and t (bottom panels), for the infinite temperature initial state 
We consider denoisers with depths M = 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and second-order Trotter circuits with depths Mtrot = 16, 32, 64  In the top panels we use a Heisenberg chain with L = 8, and in the bottom panels with L = 14, both with periodic boundary conditions  All gates are affected by two-qubit depolarizing noise with p = 0 01 
The non-denoised results are labelled with M = 0, and the noiseless values with p = 0  where sgn(η g ) is the sign of the sampled coefficient of the gth channel  γ = 1 means that all signs are positive  Observables Ô p=0 for the noiseless circuit are then approximated by resampling the observables from the denoiser ensemble
where γ = N G g=1 γ g is the overall sampling overhead, with γ g the overhead of the gth gate  Clearly, a large γ implies a large variance of Ô p=0 for a given number of samples, with accurate estimation requiring the cancellation of large signed terms  The number of samples required to resolve this cancellation of signs is bounded by Hoeffding's inequality, which states that a sufficient number of samples to estimate Ô p=0 with error δ at probability 1 − ω is bounded by (2γ 2 /δ 2 ) ln(2/ω)  
Since γ scales exponentially in γ g , it is clear that a denoiser with large M and γ 1 will require many samples  We observed that decompositions with γ > 1 are crucial for an accurate denoiser  Restricting to γ = 1 leads to large infidelity and no improvement upon increasing the number of terms in or the depth M of the denoiser 
Simply put, probabilistic error cancellation of gate noise introduces a sign problem and it is crucial to find optimal parameterizations (1) which minimize γ to make the approach scalable  This issue arises in all high performance error mitigation schemes , because the inverse of a physical noise channel is unphysical and cannot be represented as a positive sum over CPTP maps 
This is clearly visible in the spectra of the denoiser, which lies outside the unit circle (cf  Fig  )  This makes the tunability of the number of gates in each denoiser sample a crucial ingredient, which allows control over the sign problem, because we can freely choose the η i in   For the parametrization (1) of denoiser channels, we try to find a set of parameters for error mitigation by minimizing the normalized Frobenius distance between the noiseless and denoised supercircuits
which bounds the distance of output density matrices and becomes zero for perfect denoising  We carry out the minimization of on a classical processor, using gradient descent with the differential programming algorithm from   Instead of explicitly calculating the accumulated global noise channel and subsequently inverting it, we approximate the noiseless supercircuit C with the denoised supercircuit D C, effectively yielding a circuit representation D of the inverse noise channel 
Results  -To benchmark the denoiser we apply it to the second-order Trotter circuits of the spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with periodic boundary conditions (PBC) where is the Pauli algebra acting on the local Hilbert space of site i  A second-order Trotter circuit for evolution time t with depth M trot consists of M trot − 1 half brickwall layers with time step t/M trot and two layers with half time step  
We consider circuits that are affected by uniform depolarizing noise with probability p for simplicity, but our approach can be used for any non-Clifford noise  The two-qubit noise channel is which acts on neighboring qubits i and i + 1 and is applied to each Trotter and denoiser gate, and p = 0 01 unless stated otherwise 
We study circuits with depths M trot = 16, 32, 64 for evolution times t = 0 5, 1,    , 5, and denoisers D with depths M = 1, 2, 4, 6, 8  In the top panels of Fig  we show (4) for a chain of size L = 8 as a function of time t  Here it can be seen that even for M trot = 32 a denoiser with M = 1 already improves by roughly an order of magnitude at all considered t 
Depending on M trot and t, further increasing M lowers , with the biggest improvements occurring for high precision Trotter circuits with large depth M trot = 64 and short time t = 0 5, where the Trotter gates are closer to the identity than in the other cases  At the other extreme, for M trot = 16 the improvements are relatively small upon increasing M > 2  In all cases the denoiser works better at early times than at late times, again indicating that it is easier to denoise Trotter gates that are relatively close to the identity 
To probe the accuracy of the denoiser on quantities that do not enter the optimization, as a first test we consider the two-point correlator between spins at different times where we have chosen the infinite temperature initial state, and C(t) is the Trotter supercircuit for time t  In the bottom panels of Fig  we show C zz i=L/2,j=L/2 (t) for the supercircuits from the upper panels, now for a L = 14 chain 
Here we see that at M trot = 16 we can retrieve the noiseless values already with M = 1, but that increasing M trot makes this more difficult  At M trot = 64 we see larger deviations, and improvement upon increasing M is less stable, but nonetheless we are able to mitigate errors to a large extent  As a further test, we compute the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) ]
In Fig  we show the results for i = L/2, for a Trotter circuit with depth M trot = 32 and a denoiser with depth M = 2  Here we see that a denoiser with M M trot is able to recover the light-cone of correlations, which are otherwise buried by the noise  In the Supplementary Material we consider how the denoiser performs at different noise levels p, and how the denoised supercircuits perform under stacking 
There we also calculate domain wall magnetization dynamics, and show the distribution of the optimized denoiser parameters and the sampling overhead associated to the denoiser as a whole  In Fig  we show the eigenvalues of the noisy supercircuits for a noisy second-order Trotter supercircuit with M trot = 16 at t = 1 (left), the corresponding optimized denoiser with M = 4 (center), and the denoised supercircuit (right) 
The eigenvalues λ of a unitary supercircuit lie on the unit circle, and in the presence of dissipation they are pushed to the center  We see that the spectrum of the denoiser lies outside the unit circle, making it an unphysical channel which cures the effect of the noise on the circuit, such that the spectrum of the denoised circuit is pushed back to the unit circle 
The noiseless eigenvalues are shown as blue bars, making it clear that the denoiser is able to recover the noiseless eigenvalues from the noisy circuit  In the Supplementary Material we show the spectra for a p = 0 036 denoiser, where we observe a clustering of eigenvalues reminiscent of Refs    There we also investigate the channel entropy of the various supercircuits  
Conclusion  -We have introduced a probabilistic error cancellation scheme, where a classically determined denoiser mitigates the accumulated noise of a (generally non-Clifford) local noise channel  The required number of mitigation gates, i e  the dimensionality of the corresponding quasiprobability distribution, is tunable and the parameterization of the corresponding channels provides control over the sign problem that is inherent to probabilistic error cancellation 
We have shown that a denoiser with one layer can already significantly mitigate errors for second-order Trotter circuits with up to 64 layers  This effectiveness of low-depth compressed circuits for denoising, in contrast with the noiseless time evolution operator compression from , can be understood from the non-unitarity of the denoiser channels 
In particu-lar, measurements can have non-local effects, since the measurement of a single qubit can reduce some highly entangled state (e g  a GHZ state) to a product state, whereas in unitary circuits the spreading of correlations forms a light-cone  To optimize a denoiser with convenience at L > 8, the optimization can be formulated in terms of matrix product operators or channels , which is convenient because the circuit calculations leading to the normalized distance and its gradient are easily formulated in terms of tensor contractions and singular value decompositions  
This provides one route to a practical denoiser, which is relevant because the targeted noiseless circuit and the accompanying noisy variant in (4) need to be simulated classically, confining the optimization procedure to limited system sizes with an exact treatment or limited entanglement with tensor networks 
Nonetheless, we can use e g  matrix product operators to calculate (4) for some relatively small t, such that the noiseless and denoised supercircuits in (4) have relatively small entanglement, and then stack the final denoised supercircuit on a quantum processor to generate classically intractable states 
Analogously, we can optimize the channels exactly at some classically tractable size and then execute them on a quantum processor with larger size  Both approaches are limited by the light-cone of many-body correlations, as visualized in Fig  , because finite-size effects appear when the light-cone width becomes comparable with system size 
1  The normalized distance (left) and z spin correlator C zz i=L/2,j=L/2 (right), for a second-order Trotter supercircuit of depth Mtrot = 16 for time t = 1, affected by various twoqubit depolarizing errors p  We compare the values obtained with and without a denoiser, i e  M > 0 and M = 0, to the noiseless values (p = 0) 
The denoiser is affected by the same noise as the Trotter circuit  We consider denoisers with depths M = 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, and we use a L = 8 Heisenberg chain with PBC for the normalized distance, while for the correlator we use L = 14  * david luitz@uni-bonn de to observe that even for larger noise strength p, the local observable C zz improves significantly even with denoisers of depth M = 1 
For large noise strengths, we generally see that the optimization of the denoiser becomes difficult, leading to nonmonotonic behavior as a function of p, presumably because we do not find the global optimum of the denoiser  It is interesting to analyze the spectra of the supercircuits considered in this work 
As mentioned in the main text, the spectrum of the ideal, unitary supercircuit C lies on the unit circle  The comparison to this case is therefore instructive  In the main text, we showed an example of the spectra in Fig  for moderate noise strength  Here, we show additional data for stronger noise p = 0 036 in Fig  for a denoiser with M = 4 layers, optimized to mitigate errors for a second-order Trotter supercircuit with M trot = 16 layers at time t = 1 
The eigenvalues λ of the noisy supercircuit C are clustered close to zero, far away from the unit circle (except for λ = 1), showing that the circuit is strongly affected by the noise  To mitigate the impact of the noise, the denoiser consequently has to renormalize the spectrum strongly  If it accurately represents the inverse of the global noise channel, its spectrum has to lie far outside the unit circle, which is the case 
Interestingly, we observe a clustering of eigenvalues which is reminiscent to the spectra found in   By comparison to these works, we suspect that this is due to the local nature of the denoiser, and warrants further investigation  The right panel of Fig  shows the result of the denoiser, pushing the eigenvalues back to the unit circle, nearly with the exact same distribution along the circle as the noiseless eigenvalues (blue bars) 
Due to the strong noise, this is not achieved perfectly, and it is clear that this cannot work in principle if the global noise channel has a zero eigenvalue  The complexity of an operator can be quantified by its operator entanglement entropy   Here we calculate the half-chain channel entanglement entropy S of the noiseless C, noisy C, denoiser D, and denoised D C supercircuits 
We define S as the entanglement entropy of the state that is related to a supercircuit C via the Choi-Jamio lkowski isomorphism, i e  ψ C = χ C /N , where the process matrix χ ab,cd C = C ac,bd is simply a reshaped supercircuit and N ensures normalization  Then we have S = −Tr [ψ C ln ψ C ]  This entropy measure is a particular instance of the "exchange entropy", which characterizes the information exchange between a quantum system and its environment  
In Fig  we plot the various S for a second-order Trotter circuit with M trot = 16 at t = 2, for a denoiser with M = 4, both affected by two-qubit depolarizing noise with p ∈ [10 −3 , 10 −1 ]  The Trotter circuit is for a Heisenberg model with L = 6 and PBC  We see that at large p, the noise destroys entanglement in the noisy supercircuit, and that the denoiser S increases to correct for this, such that the denoised supercircuit recovers the noiseless S 
Here we investigate how denoised supercircuits perform upon repeated application  We optimize the denoiser for a Trotter supercircuit for a fixed evolution time t  Then, to reach later times, we stack the denoised supercircuit n times to approximate the evolution up to time nt: In Fig  we stack a denoised t = 1 supercircuit up to n = 20 times and calculate the correlation function, defined in the main text, for the middle site 
We consider Trotter depths M trot = 8, 16, 32, 64 and denoiser depths M = 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, for a L = 14 Heisenberg chain with p = 0 01 depolarizing two-qubit noise  The noisy results correspond to M = 0 and the noiseless results to p = 0  In Fig  we calculate the OTOC, defined in the main text, with stacked time evolution for a denoised t = 2 supercircuit with M trot = 32 and M = 2, stacked up to ten times 
We see that the stacked supercircuit performs very well, and the additional precision obtained by using deep denoisers (M = 8) pays off for long evolution times, where we see convergence to the exact result (black dashed lines in Fig  ) as a function of M   FIG    The two-point z-spin correlator C zz i=L/2,j=L/2 (t) of a spin on the middle site at times 0 and t, for the infinite temperature initial state, for denoised second-order Trotter supercircuits that are optimized at evolution time t = 1 and then stacked up to twenty times 
We use Trotter depths Mtrot = 8, 16, 32, 64 and denoiser depths M = 1, 2, 4, 6, 8  The calculations were performed for a periodic Heisenberg model with L = 14 and PBC, affected by two-qubit depolarizing noise with strength p = 0 01, which also affects the denoiser  The non-denoised results are labelled with M = 0, and the noiseless results with p = 0 
The panels are arranged as Mtrot = 8, 16, 32, 64 for top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, respectively  The costliest and most noise-susceptible operation is the two-qubit ZZ rotation with angle α, which is the foundation of the unitary piece in our channel parameterization, defined in the main text 
For completeness, we here present the α angles of the optimized denoisers  The results are shown in Fig  , which contains histograms for the channel count N G versus α  The histograms are stacked, with the lightest color corresponding to the angles of the denoiser at t = 0 5 and the darkest at t = 5  The top four panels are for a denoiser with M = 2 and the bottom four with M = 8 
We consider M trot = 8, 16, 32, 64  We see that in both cases the distribution widens upon increasing M trot , indicating that the unitary channels start deviating more from the identity  Moreover, while the M = 2 denoisers in all cases except M trot = 64 have ZZ contributions close to the identity, this is clearly not the case for M = 8 
For simplicity, we did not focus on obtaining denoisers with the smallest sampling overhead γ, which is required to minimize the sign problem and hence ease the sampling of mitigated quantities  Instead, we let the optimization freely choose the η i in the denoiser parameterization, as defined in the main text 
In Fig  we show the sampling overhead of the denoisers from Fig  of the main text  We see that for M = 1 and M = 2 the sampling overhead is relatively small and uniform across the different t, whereas for M > 2 the optimization sometimes yields a denoiser with large γ and other times with small γ  This could be related to the difference in α distributions from Fig   
The large fluctuations of γ appears to stem from the difficulty in finding optimal deep denoisers, and our optimization procedure likely only finds a local minimum in these cases  Here C(t) is the Trotter supercircuit for time t  In Fig  we show Z dw for the circuits from Fig 



ground_truth: Environmental fluctuation and uncertainty control the reliance of artificial organisms on plasticity.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Who is the county seat of McPherson County?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 2: McPherson County (standard abbreviation: MP) is a county located in the U S  state of Kansas   As of the 2020 census, the county population was 30,223  The largest city and county seat is McPherson  The county is named for Civil War General James B  McPherson 

History

Early history

For many millennia, the Great Plains of North America was inhabited by nomadic Native Americans  From the 16th century to 18th century, the Kingdom of France claimed ownership of large parts of North America  In 1762, after the French and Indian War, France secretly ceded New France to Spain, per the Treaty of Fontainebleau  In 1802, Spain returned most of the land to France, but keeping title to about 7,500 square miles 

In 1803, most of the land for modern day Kansas was acquired by the United States from France as part of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase for 2 83 cents per acre  In 1848, after the Mexican–American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Spain brought into the United States all or part of land for ten future states, including southwest Kansas  In 1854, the Kansas Territory was organized, then in 1861 Kansas became the 34th U S  state 

19th century

From the 1820s to 1870s, the Santa Fe Trail passed through, what is now McPherson County  The trail entered the county, east of Canton, then south of Galva, then north of Inman, and west towards Lyons  In 1855, Charles O  Fuller established a ranch adjacent to the Running Turkey Creek Crossing about two miles south and one mile east of Galva  Fuller's Ranch provided accommodations for travelers on the Santa Fe Trail and was probably the first white settlement in McPherson County 

Peketon County was established in 1860, by the passage of a bill by S  N  Wood:  An act to establish Peketon County  Section 1  - That all that territory west of the sixth principal meridian and south of Township 16, in Kansas Territory, be and the same is hereby erected into a county, to be known by the name of Peketon County  On February 17, 1865, Peketon County was abolished, and McPherson County was made a part of Marion County, which extended from the west line of Chase County to the present western boundary of Kansas 

In 1868, Solomon Stephens and L  N  Holmberg were appointed Justices of the Peace—the first officers in what is now McPherson County  The next year (1869) occurred the first election for the township, now the county of McPherson  McPherson was regularly organized as a county in the spring of 1870, a mass meeting being held at Sweadal  Sweadal, the county seat thus selected, was located about one mile and a half southwest of the present site of Lindsborg  In September, however, the County Commissioners resolved to meet at the latter place, McPherson which had already been located some two years 

In April, 1873, a petition was filed for the county seat re-location  It was signed by 483 voters, and a special election was accordingly ordered for June 10  Upon that day, McPherson received 605 votes, New Gottland 325, King City 3 and Lindsborg 1; McPherson's majority over all, 276  In May the McPherson Town Company had offered, as an inducement for the location of the county seat at this point, the free use of rooms for ten years, and the donation of two squares of land on the town site  The offer was accepted the next month, the County Commissioners selecting blocks 56 and 65  Thus the county seat was established at McPherson and has remained since 

As early as 1875, city leaders of Marion held a meeting to consider a branch railroad from Florence  In 1878, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and parties from Marion County and McPherson County chartered the Marion and McPherson Railway Company   In 1879, a branch line was built from Florence to McPherson, in 1880 it was extended to Lyons, in 1881 it was extended to Ellinwood  The line was leased and operated by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway  The line from Florence to Marion, was abandoned in 1968  In 1992, the line from Marion to McPherson was sold to Central Kansas Railway  In 1993, after heavy flood damage, the line from Marion to McPherson was abandoned  The original branch line connected Florence, Marion, Canada, Hillsboro, Lehigh, Canton, Galva, McPherson, Conway, Windom, Little River, Mitchell, Lyons, Chase, then connected with the original AT&SF main line at Ellinwood 

In 1887, the Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railway extended its main line from Herington to Pratt   This main line connected Herington, Ramona, Tampa, Durham, Waldeck, Canton, Galva, McPherson, Groveland, Inman, Medora, Hutchinson, Whiteside, Partridge, Arlington,  Langdon, Turon, Preston, Natrona, Pratt   In 1888, this main line was extended to Liberal   Later, this line was extended to Tucumcari, New Mexico and Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where it made a connection with the Southern Pacific from El Paso, Texas   The Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railway was absorbed by the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway  This line is also called the "Golden State Route" 

20th century
The National Old Trails Road, also known as the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway, was established in 1912, and was routed through Windom, Conway, McPherson 

Geography

According to the U S  Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which  is land and  (0 3%) is water 

Adjacent counties
 Saline County (north)
 Dickinson County (northeast)
 Marion County (east)
 Harvey County (southeast)
 Reno County (southwest)
 Rice County (west)
 Ellsworth County (northwest)

Major highways
  Interstate 135
  U S  Route 56
  U S  Route 81
  K-4
  K-61
  K-153

Demographics

The McPherson Micropolitan Statistical Area includes all of McPherson County 

2000 census
As of the census of 2000, there were 29,554 people, 11,205 households, and 7,966 families residing in the county   The population density was 33 people per square mile (13/km2)   There were 11,830 housing units at an average density of 13 per square mile (5/km2)   The racial makeup of the county was 96 53% White, 0 81% Black or African American, 0 34% Native American, 0 32% Asian, 0 06% Pacific Islander, 0 79% from other races, and 1 16% from two or more races   1 94% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race  37 1% were of German, 12 9% Swedish, 12 1% American, 6 7% English and 6 3% Irish ancestry according to Census 2000 

There were 11,205 households, out of which 33 00% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 62 50% were married couples living together, 6 00% had a female householder with no husband present, and 28 90% were non-families  25 50% of all households were made up of individuals, and 11 80% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older   The average household size was 2 49 and the average family size was 2 99 

In the county, the population was spread out, with 25 40% under the age of 18, 10 30% from 18 to 24, 25 20% from 25 to 44, 21 80% from 45 to 64, and 17 30% who were 65 years of age or older   The median age was 38 years  For every 100 females there were 95 90 males   For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 92 90 males 

The median income for a household in the county was $41,138, and the median income for a family was $48,243  Males had a median income of $33,530 versus $21,175 for females  The per capita income for the county was $18,921   About 4 20% of families and 6 60% of the population were below the poverty line, including 5 20% of those under age 18 and 8 10% of those age 65 or over 

Government

Presidential elections
McPherson county is often carried by Republican candidates  The last time a Democratic candidate has carried this county was in 1964 by Lyndon B  Johnson 

Laws
Following amendment to the Kansas Constitution in 1986, the county remained a prohibition, or "dry", county until 1996, when voters approved the sale of alcoholic liquor by the individual drink with a 30 percent food sales requirement 

Education

Colleges
 McPherson College in McPherson
 Bethany College in Lindsborg
 Central Christian College in McPherson

Unified school districts
 Smoky Valley USD 400
 McPherson USD 418
 Canton-Galva USD 419
 Moundridge USD 423
 Inman USD 448

School district office in neighboring county
 Goessel USD 411
 Little River-Windom USD 444

Museums
 Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg
 McCormick-Deering Days Museum in Inman
 McPherson Museum in McPherson
 Lindsborg Old Mill & Swedish Heritage Museum in Lindsborg
 Kansas Motorcycle Museum in Marquette

Communities

Cities

 Canton
 Galva
 Inman
 Lindsborg
 Marquette
 McPherson (county seat) 
 Moundridge
 Windom

Unincorporated communities
† means a Census-Designated Place (CDP) by the United States Census Bureau 
 Conway
 Elyria†
 Groveland
 Johnstown
 New Gottland
 Roxbury†

Ghost towns
 Alta Mills
 Battle Hill
 Christian
 Doles Park
 Elivon
 King City
 Sweadal

Townships
McPherson County is divided into twenty-five townships   The cities of Lindsborg and McPherson are considered governmentally independent and are excluded from the census figures for the townships   In the following table, the population center is the largest city (or cities) included in that township's population total, if it is of a significant size 

See also
 List of people from McPherson County, Kansas
 National Register of Historic Places listings in McPherson County, Kansas
 McPherson Valley Wetlands
 Maxwell Wildlife Refuge

References

Notes

Further reading

 Wheeler, Wayne Leland  "An Analysis of Social Change in a Swedish-Immigrant Community: The Case of Lindsborg, Kansas " (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1959  5905657) 

County
 Through the Years: A Pictorial History of McPherson County; McPherson Sentinel' Heritage House Publishing Co; 1992 
 McPherson County First Courthouse Built About 1869 or 1870; Lindsborg News-Record; March 30, 1959 
 Pioneer Life and Lore of McPherson County, Kansas; Edna Nyquist; Democratic-Opinion Press; 1932 
 A History of the Church of the Brethren in Kansas (includes McPherson College history); Elmer LeRoy Craik; McPherson Daily; Republican Press; 397 pages; 1922 
 Portrait and Biographical Record of Dickinson, Saline, McPherson, and Marion Counties, Kansas; Chapman Bros; 614 pages; 1893 
 Standard Atlas of McPherson County, Kansas; Geo  A  Ogle & Co; 82 pages; 1921 
 Plat Book of McPherson County, Kansas; North West Publishing Co; 50 pages; 1903 
 Edwards' Atlas of McPherson County, Kansas; John P  Edwards; 51 pages; 1884 

Trails
 The Story of the Marking of the Santa Fe Trail by the Daughters of the American Revolution in Kansas and the State of Kansas; Almira Cordry; Crane Co; 164 pages; 1915  (Download 4MB PDF eBook)
 The National Old Trails Road To Southern California, Part 1 (LA to KC); Automobile Club Of Southern California; 64 pages; 1916  (Download 6 8MB PDF eBook)

Mennonite Settlements
 Impact of Mennonite settlement on the cultural landscape of Kansas; Brenda Martin; Kansas State University; 1985/1988  
 Mennonite settlement : the relationship between the physical and cultural environment; Susan Movle; University of Utah; 1975/1886 
 Status of Mennonite women in Kansas in their church and home relationships; Eva Harshbarger; Bluffton College; 1925/1945 

External links

County
 
 McPherson County - Directory of Public Officials
Historical
 , from Hatteberg's People'' on KAKE TV news
Maps
 McPherson County Maps: Current, Historic, KDOT
 Kansas Highway Maps: Current, Historic, KDOT
 Kansas Railroad Maps: Current, 1996, 1915, KDOT and Kansas Historical Society

 
Kansas counties
1867 establishments in Kansas
Populated places established in 1867



ground_truth: McPherson.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What size chains were used in the benchmarking?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 4:  For both SVCCA and TSVD-Reg, Wide-SEW-ResNet14 and Wide-SEW-ResNet8 achieve the first and second highest final similarity scores respectively  But for RSA, TNT-S and Inception-ResNet-V2 take their place and outperform other models by a large margin  As for SEW ResNet and ResNet, the former performs significantly better than the latter for both SVCCA and TSVD-Reg (t = 8 195, p = 0 001; t = 7 528, p = 0 002) 
However, the difference is not significant for RSA (t = 1 117, p = 0 327)  Specifically, the similarity score of SEW ResNet152 is only slightly higher than that of ResNet152, and at the depth of 50 and 101, SEW ResNet's scores are lower than ResNet's  Macaque-Synthetic dataset  Similar to the results of Allen Brain dataset, no model performs best for all three metrics 
SEW ResNet performs moderately better than ResNet (t = 3 354, p = 0 028; t = 3 824, p = 0 019; t = 2 343, p = 0 079)  The only contrary is that SEW ResNet18 performs worse than ResNet18 for RSA  Further, to check the details of comparison between the SNNs and their CNN counterparts, we analyze the trajectories of similarity score across model layers (Figure ) 
As for ResNet and SEW ResNet with the same depth, the trends of their similarities across model layers are almost the same, but the former's trajectory is generally below the latter's  In other words, the similarity scores of SEW ResNet are higher than those of ResNet at almost all layers  Taken together, the results suggest that when the overall results that appear below also correspond to the three metrics in this order, unless the correspondence is stated in the text 
architectures and depth are the same, SNNs with spiking neurons perform consistently better than their counterparts of CNNs with an average increase of 6 6%  Besides, SEW ResNet14 also outperforms the brain-like recurrent CNN, CORnet-S, with the same number of layers (see more details in Appendix B)  Two properties of SNNs might contribute to the higher similarity scores 
On the one hand, IF neurons are the basic neurons of spiking neural networks  The IF neuron uses several differential equations to roughly approximate the membrane potential dynamics of biological neurons, which provides a more biologically plausible spike mechanism for the network  On the other hand, the spiking neural network is able to capture the temporal features by incorporating both time and binary signals, just like the biological visual system during information processing 
To figure out the distinctions in the functional hierarchy between macaques and mice, for each cortical region, we obtain the normalized depth of the layer that achieves the highest similarity score in each model  Then, we divide models (excluding vision transformers) into two groups based on their depths and conduct investigations on these two groups separately 
A nonparametric ANOVA is applied to each group for testing whether layer depths change significantly across cortical regions  For mouse visual cortex (Figure (a)), taking the deep model group as an example, ANOVA shows overall significant changes in depth across cortical regions for TSVD-Reg and RSA (Friedman's χ 2 = 49 169,
p = 2 0 × 10 −9 ; χ 2 = 19 455, p = 0 002)  But there is no significant change for SVCCA (χ 2 = 8 689, p = 0 122)  According to these results, the differences in depth across regions are indeterminacy and irregular  Meanwhile, the trends of layer depth between some regions contradict the hierarchy observed in physiological experiments of mice (those between VISp and VISrl for TSVD-Reg and between VISal and VISpm for RSA) 
However, for macaque visual cortex (Figure (b)), there are significant differences (t = −5 451, p = 6 5 × 10 −6 ; t = −8 312, p = 2 8 × 10 −9 ; t = −3 782, p = 6 9 × 10 −4 , also taking the deep model group as an example) between V4 and IT, and the trend is consistent with the information processing hierarchy in primate visual cortex 
The comparative analyses of the best layer depths of the shallow and deep model groups also exhibit the differences between macaques and mice  For mouse visual cortex, the best layer depths of shallow models are significantly higher than those of deep models  Compared to deep models, most shallow models achieve the top similarity scores in intermediate and even later layers 
Differently, for macaque visual cortex, the depth of models has little effect on the depth of the most similar layer  What's more, we find that the most similar layer of mouse visual cortex always occurs after the 28 × 28 feature map is downsampled to 14 × 14, which leads to the layer depths' difference between shallow and deep models 
Nevertheless, the best layer of macaque IT appears in the last part of networks, where the feature map has been downsampled more times  In summary, our results might reveal two distinctions in the functional hierarchy between macaques and mice  First, there is a distinct functional hierarchical structure of macaque ventral visual pathway, while there might be no clear sequential functional hierarchy in mouse visual cortex 
One explanation is that the mouse visual cortex is organized into a parallel structure and the function of mouse cortical regions are more generalized and homogeneous than those of macaques  Another possibility would be that even though the sequential relations exist among mouse cortical regions as proposed in anatomical and physiological work, they are too weak for the current deep neural networks to capture 
Additionally, mice perform more complex visual tasks than expected with a limited brain capacity   Consequently, the neural responses of mouse visual cortex may contain more information not related to object recognition that neural networks focus on  Secondly, it is well known that the units in the neural networks get larger receptive fields after downsampling, and through the analyses of differences between two groups of models based on depth, we find the feature map of the best layer for mouse is downsampled fewer times than that for macaque 
Based on these results, we provide computational evidence that the increased ratio of the receptive field size in cortical regions across the mouse visual pathway is smaller than those across the macaque visual pathways, which echoes some physio- Macaque-Face dataset --- Table : The correlation between the similarity scores and the number of parameters 
r is Spearman's rank correlation coefficient  "-" indicates that there is no significant correlation  To explore the processing mechanisms in the visual cortex of macaques and mice, we investigate the model properties from the whole to the details  As shown in Table and 2, we first measure the correlation between the similarity scores and the sizes (i e  the number of trainable parameters and the depth) of network models 
For Allen Brain mouse dataset, there are significant negative correlations between the similarity scores and the number of parameters for three metrics while there is no correlation with the depth  Conversely, for the two macaque neural datasets, the similarity scores are highly correlated with the depth of networks, but not with the number of parameters 
Specifically, there is a positive correlation for Macaque-Face dataset while a negative correlation for Macaque-Synthetic dataset  (We also apply the linear regression to analyze the correlation between the similarity scores and the model size  The results are consistent with Spearman's rank correlation and are shown in Appendix E) 
Based on these results, we further investigate more detailed properties of neural networks to explain the processing mechanisms in the visual cortex  For the mouse dataset, on the one hand, the best layer depths show non-significant changes across the mouse cortical regions as mentioned in the previous section 
On the other hand, the similarity scores of the mouse dataset are only correlated with the number of model parameters but not with the depth of models  It calls into the question whether any detailed structures in the neural networks help to reduce the number of parameters and improve its similarity to mouse visual cortex 
Therefore, we explore the commonalities between models that have the top 20% representation similarities (see Appendix D) for Allen Brain dataset  As expected, the top models contain similar structures, such as fire module, inception module, and depthwise separable convolution  All these structures essentially process information through multiple branches/channels and then integrate the features from each branch 
The models with this type of structure outperform other models (t = 2 411, p = 0 024; t = 3 030, p = 0 007; t = 1 174, p = 0 247)  Moreover, we apply the depthwise separable convolution to SNNs, which yields a positive effect  The representation similarity of Spiking-MobileNet is higher than SEW-ResNet50 with a similar depth (+0 8%; +3 9%; +12 1%) 
In fact, some studies using multiple pathways simulate the functions of mouse visual cortex to some extent   Our results further suggest that not only the mouse visual cortex might be an organization of parallel structures, but also there are extensive parallel information processing streams between each pair of cortical regions  
For the two macaque datasets with different stimuli, not only are the model rankings significantly different, but also the correlations between the similarity scores and the model depth are totally opposite  These results corroborate the following two processing mechanisms in macaques: the ventral visual stream of primate visual cortex possesses canonical coding principles at different stages; the brain exhibits a high degree of functional specialization, such as the visual recognition of faces and other objects, which is reflected in the different neural responses of the corresponding region (although the face patch AM is a sub-network of IT, they differ in the neural representations) 
Besides, as shown in Figure , The calculation and plotting of the trajectories are the same as Figure   the similarity scores of vision transformers reach the maximum in the early layers and then decrease  Differently, the scores of CNNs and SNNs keep trending upwards, reaching the maximum in almost the last layer 
On the other hand, Appendix C shows that vision transformers perform well in Macaque-Face dataset but poorly in Macaque-Synthetic dataset  Considering the features extraction mechanism of vision transformers, it divides the image into several patches and encodes each patch as well as their internal relation by self-attention 
This mechanism is effective for face images that are full of useful information  However, the synthetic image consists of a central target object and a naturalistic background  When vision transformers are fed with this type of stimuli, premature integration of global information can lead to model representations containing noise from the unrelated background 
What's more, when we take all models with the top 20% representation similarities as a whole for analyses, as described in the above paragraph, the properties that enable networks to achieve higher neural similarity are not yet clear  Taken together, the computational mechanism of the better models may reveal core processing divergence to different types of stimuli in the visual cortex 
In this work, we take large-scale neural representation similarity experiments as a basis, aided by analyses of the similarities across models and the visual cortical regions  Compared to other work, we introduce SNNs in the similarity analyses with biological neural responses for the first time, showing that SNNs achieve higher similarity scores than CNNs that have the same depth and almost the same architectures 
As analyzed in Section 3 1, two properties of SNNs might serve as the explanations for their high similarity scores  The subsequent analyses of the models' simulation performance and structures indicate significant differences in functional hierarchies between macaque and mouse visual cortex  As for macaques, we observed a clear sequential hi-erarchy 
However, as for mouse visual cortex, some work ) exhibits that the trend of the model feature complexity roughly matches the processing hierarchy, but other work suggests that the cortex ) is organized into a parallel structure  Our results are more supportive of the latter  Furthermore, we provide computational evidence not only that the increased ratio of the receptive field size in cortical regions across the mouse visual pathway is smaller than those across the macaque visual pathway, but also that there may be multiple pathways with parallel processing streams between mouse cortical regions 
Our results also clearly reveal that the processing mechanisms of macaque visual cortex differ to various stimuli  These findings provide us with new insights into the visual processing mechanisms of macaque and mouse, which are the two species that dominate the research of biological vision systems and differ considerably from each other 
Compared to CNNs, the study of task-driven deep SNNs is just in its initial state  Although we demonstrate that SNNs outperform their counterparts of CNNs, SNNs exhibit similar properties as CNNs in the further analyses  In this work, we only build several new SNNs by taking the hints from the biological visual hierarchy, while many well-established structures and learning algorithms in CNNs have not been applied to SNNs yet 
In addition, the neural datasets used in our experiments are all collected under static image stimuli, lacking rich dynamic information to some certain, which may not fully exploit the properties of SNNs  Given that SNNs perform well in the current experiments, we hope to explore more potential of SNNs in future work 
In conclusion, as more biologically plausible neural networks, SNNs may serve as a shortcut to explore the biological visual cortex  With studies on various aspects of SNNs, such as model architectures, learning algorithms, processing mechanisms, and neural coding methods, it's highly promising to better explain the sophisticated, complex, and diverse vision systems in the future 

Implementation Details of SNNs Spiking Neuron Model

For all SNNs, we use the Integrate-and-Fire (IF) model as the spiking neuron model, which acts as the activation layer in neural networks  As mentioned in , V t , X t and S t denote the state (membrane voltage), input (current) and output (spike) of the spiking neuron model respectively at time-step t, and the dynamics of the IF model can be described as follows:
(1) (2) (3) While V t is the membrane voltage after the trigger of a spike, H t is also the membrane voltage, but after charging and before a spike firing  Θ(x) is the unit step function, so S t equals 1 when H t is greater than or equal to the threshold voltage V thresh and 0 otherwise  Meanwhile, when a spike fires, V t is reset to V reset  
Here, we set V thresh = 1 and V reset = 0  In addition, because Θ(x) is non-differentiable at 0, the surrogate gradient method is applied to approximate the derivative function during back-propagation  Here, we use the inverse tangent function as the surrogate gradient function and the derivative function is
(5) In our experiments on SNNs, we not only use SEW ResNet proposed by ), but also build several new SNNs  On the one hand, we improve the spike-elementwise block in SEW ResNet with new architectures referring to studies on ResNet , as shown in Table   On the other hand, as the multi-branch structures in CNNs increase neural representation similarity to mouse visual cortex, we use depthwise separable convolutions and follow the overall architecture of MobileNetV2 to build the SpikingMobileNet, the basic block of which is shown in Figure  
Our implementation is based on SpikingJelly , an open-source framework of deep SNN  We use the ImageNet dataset to pre-train the new SNNs  Following the settings for training SEW ResNet , we train the models for 320 epochs on 8 GPUs (NVIDIA V100), using SGD with a mini-batch size of 32  The momentum is 0 9 and the weight decay is 0  The initial learning rate is 0 1 and we decay it with a cosine annealing, where the maximum number of iterations is the same as the number of epochs 
For all SNNs, we set the simulation duration T = 4 

Overall model rankings

The results of model rankings are shown in Figure , 8 and 9  We also apply the Spearman's rank correlation to the overall model rankings of different metrics, which is shown in Figure  

Score Comparisons among Model Groups

We conduct comparisons of similarity scores among CNNs, SNNs, and vision transformers  The results are shown in Figure  

Overall CNN rankings

The results of CNN rankings are shown in Figure , 13 and 14 

Correlations between the Model Sizes and the Similarity Scores

The results of linear regression to model sizes and the similarity scores are shown in Figure , 16 and 17 

The ImageNet Accuracy and the Similarity Scores

The results are shown in Figure  



ground_truth: L = 8 and L = 14.