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The brain is believed to implement probabilistic reasoning and to represent information via population, or distributed, coding. Most previous population-based probabilistic (PPC) theories share several basic properties: 1) continuous-valued…

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…

Why do neurons encode information the way they do? Normative answers to this question model neural activity as the solution to an optimisation problem; for example, the celebrated efficient coding hypothesis frames neural activity as the…

Presence of bias (in datasets or tasks) is inarguably one of the most critical challenges in machine learning applications that has alluded to pivotal debates in recent years. Such challenges range from spurious associations between…

We propose and study a method for learning interpretable representations for the task of regression. Features are represented as networks of multi-type expression trees comprised of activation functions common in neural networks in addition…

A steadily increasing body of evidence suggests that the brain performs probabilistic inference to interpret and respond to sensory input and that trial-to-trial variability in neural activity plays an important role. The neural sampling…

Most efforts in interpretability in deep learning have focused on (1) extracting explanations of a specific downstream task in relation to the input features and (2) imposing constraints on the model, often at the expense of predictive…

This note uses a conformal prediction procedure to provide further support on several points discussed by Professor Efron (Efron, 2020) concerning prediction, estimation and IID assumption. It aims to convey the following messages: (1)…

Natural images follow statistics inherited by the structure of our physical (visual) environment. In particular, a prominent facet of this structure is that images can be described by a relatively sparse number of features. We designed a…

Representational straightening refers to a decrease in curvature of visual feature representations of a sequence of frames taken from natural movies. Prior work established straightening in neural representations of the primate primary…

A new method for the unsupervised learning of sparse representations using autoencoders is proposed and implemented by ordering the output of the hidden units by their activation value and progressively reconstructing the input in this…

Complex-valued sparse coding is a data representation which employs a dictionary of two-dimensional subspaces, while imposing a sparse, factorial prior on complex amplitudes. When trained on a dataset of natural image patches, it learns…

Understanding brain function, constructing computational models and engineering neural prosthetics require assessing two problems, namely encoding and decoding, but their relation remains controversial. For decades, the encoding problem has…

Sparse coding in learned dictionaries has been established as a successful approach for signal denoising, source separation and solving inverse problems in general. A dictionary learning method adapts an initial dictionary to a particular…

This paper conjectures and validates a framework that allows for action during inference in supervised neural networks. Supervised neural networks are constructed with the objective to maximize their performance metric in any given task.…

Despite impressive performance on numerous visual tasks, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) --- unlike brains --- are often highly sensitive to small perturbations of their input, e.g. adversarial noise leading to erroneous decisions. We…

Cortical sensory neurons are known to be highly variable, in the sense that responses evoked by identical stimuli often change dramatically from trial to trial. The origin of this variability is uncertain, but it is usually interpreted as…

Research aimed at scaling up neuroscience inspired learning algorithms for neural networks is accelerating. Recently, a key research area has been the study of energy-based learning algorithms such as predictive coding, due to their…

Coded recurrent neural networks with three levels of sparsity are introduced. The first level is related to the size of messages, much smaller than the number of available neurons. The second one is provided by a particular coding rule,…

Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…