Related papers: Sparse incomplete representations: A novel role fo…
Studies of insect olfactory processing indicate that odors are represented by rich spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity. These patterns are very difficult to predict a priori, yet they are stimulus specific and reliable upon repeated…
The integration of neural representations in the two hemispheres is an important problem in neuroscience. Recent experiments revealed that odor responses in cortical neurons driven by separate stimulation of the two nostrils are highly…
Understanding how molecular structure gives rise to odor perception remains a long-standing challenge, with ongoing debate over whether olfaction is primarily governed by molecular shape, vibrational properties, or their interplay at the…
The olfactory system employs responses of an ensemble of odorant receptors (ORs) to sense molecules and to generate olfactory percepts. Here we hypothesized that ORs can be viewed as 3D spatial filters that extract molecular features…
Local computation in microcircuits is an essential feature of distributed information processing in vertebrate and invertebrate brains. The insect antennal lobe represents a spatially confined local network that processes high-dimensional…
We present a generalized theoretical framework for olfactory representation and plasticity, using the theory of smooth manifolds and sheaves to depict categorical odor learning via distributed neural computation. Beginning with the space of…
The olfactory system is constantly solving pattern-recognition problems by the creation of a large space to codify odour representations and optimizing their distribution within it. A model of the Olfactory Bulb was developed by Z. Li and…
Motivated by a proposed olfactory mechanism based on a vibrationally-activated molecular switch, we study electron transport within a donor-acceptor pair that is coupled to a vibrational mode and embedded in a surrounding environment. We…
Olfactory systems use a small number of broadly sensitive receptors to combinatorially encode a vast number of odors. We propose a method of decoding such distributed representations by exploiting a statistical fact: receptors that do not…
Sparse sensor placement is a central challenge in the efficient characterization of complex systems when the cost of acquiring and processing data is high. Leading sparse sensing methods typically exploit either spatial or temporal…
Predicting olfactory perception directly from molecular structure is central to fragrance design that plays a role in a wide range of industries, such as perfumery, food and beverage, and health care. Among olfactory attributes, odor…
Biological circuits have evolved to incorporate multiple modules that perform similar functions. In the fly olfactory circuit, both lateral inhibition (LI) and neuronal spike frequency adaptation (SFA) are thought to enhance pattern…
Natural odors typically consist of many molecules at different concentrations. It is unclear how the numerous odorant molecules and their possible mixtures are discriminated by relatively few olfactory receptors. Using an…
Sparse coding networks, which utilize unsupervised learning to maximize coding efficiency, have successfully reproduced response properties found in primary visual cortex \cite{AN:OlshausenField96}. However, conventional sparse coding…
Our sense of smell relies on sensitive, selective atomic-scale processes that are initiated when a scent molecule meets specific receptors in the nose. However, the physical mechanisms of detection are not clear. While odorant shape and…
A popular approach within the signal processing and machine learning communities consists in modelling signals as sparse linear combinations of atoms selected from a learned dictionary. While this paradigm has led to numerous empirical…
We propose a formal mathematical model for sparse representations and active dendrites in neocortex. Our model is inspired by recent experimental findings on active dendritic processing and NMDA spikes in pyramidal neurons. These…
Olfaction lies at the intersection of chemical structure, neural encoding, and linguistic perception, yet existing representation methods fail to fully capture this pathway. Current approaches typically model only isolated segments of the…
The mushroom body is the key network for the representation of learned olfactory stimuli in Drosophila and insects. The sparse activity of Kenyon cells, the principal neurons in the mushroom body, plays a key role in the learned…
We analyze the psychophysical responses of human observers to an ensemble of monomolecular odorants. Each odorant is characterized by a set of 146 perceptual descriptors obtained from a database of odor character profiles. Each odorant is…