Polarity is all you need to learn and transfer faster

Natural intelligences (NIs) thrive in a dynamic world - they learn quickly, sometimes with only a few samples. In contrast, Artificial intelligences (AIs) typically learn with prohibitive amount of training samples and computational power. What design principle difference between NI and AI could contribute to such a discrepancy? Here, we propose an angle from weight polarity: development processes initialize NIs with advantageous polarity configurations; as NIs grow and learn, synapse magnitudes update yet polarities are largely kept unchanged. We demonstrate with simulation and image classification tasks that if weight polarities are adequately set $\textit{a priori}$, then networks learn with less time and data. We also explicitly illustrate situations in which $\textit{a priori}$ setting the weight polarities is disadvantageous for networks. Our work illustrates the value of weight polarities from the perspective of statistical and computational efficiency during learning.