Related papers: Retinal metric: a stimulus distance measure derive…
As subjects perceive the sensory world, different stimuli elicit a number of neural representations. Here, a subjective distance between stimuli is defined, measuring the degree of similarity between the underlying representations. As an…
Although perceptual (dis)similarity between sensory stimuli seems akin to distance, measuring the Euclidean distance between vector representations of auditory stimuli is a poor estimator of subjective dissimilarity. In hearing, nonlinear…
The brain has no direct access to physical stimuli, but only to the spiking activity evoked in sensory organs. It is unclear how the brain can structure its representation of the world based on differences between those noisy, correlated…
Understanding how neural population responses represent sensory information is a central problem in systems neuroscience. One approach is to define a representational geometry on stimulus space in which distances reflect how reliably…
Common measures of neural representational (dis)similarity are designed to be insensitive to rotations and reflections of the neural activation space. Motivated by the premise that the tuning of individual units may be important, there has…
Redundancies and correlations in the responses of sensory neurons seem to waste neural resources but can carry cues about structured stimuli and may help the brain to correct for response errors. To assess how the retina negotiates this…
Encoding the distance between locations in space is essential for accurate navigation. Grid cells, a functional class of neurons in medial entorhinal cortex, are believed to support this computation. However, existing theories of how…
Computation in the brain involves multiple types of neurons, yet the organizing principles for how these neurons work together remain unclear. Information theory has offered explanations for how different types of neurons can optimize the…
Human similarity judgments are inconsistent with Euclidean, Hamming, Mahalanobis, and the majority of measures used in the extensive literatures on similarity and dissimilarity. From intrinsic properties of brain circuitry, we derive…
The predictive properties of a retina are studied by measuring the mutual information (MI) between its stimulation and the corresponding firing rates while it is being probed by a train of short pulses with stochastic intervals. Features of…
Measuring visual similarity between two or more instances within a data distribution is a fundamental task in image retrieval. Theoretically, non-metric distances are able to generate a more complex and accurate similarity model than metric…
Although recovering an Euclidean distance matrix from noisy observations is a common problem in practice, how well this could be done remains largely unknown. To fill in this void, we study a simple distance matrix estimate based upon the…
Our sensory systems transform external signals into neural activity, thereby producing percepts. We are endowed with an intuitive notion of similarity between percepts, that need not reflect the proximity of the physical properties of the…
Distance metrics and their nonlinear variant play a crucial role in machine learning based real-world problem solving. We demonstrated how Euclidean and cosine distance measures differ not only theoretically but also in real-world medical…
Metric learning from a set of triplet comparisons in the form of "Do you think item h is more similar to item i or item j?", indicating similarity and differences between items, plays a key role in various applications including image…
Correlations in sensory neural networks have both extrinsic and intrinsic origins. Extrinsic or stimulus correlations arise from shared inputs to the network, and thus depend strongly on the stimulus ensemble. Intrinsic or noise…
A novel definition of the stimulus-specific information is presented, which is particularly useful when the stimuli constitute a continuous and metric set, as for example, position in space. The approach allows one to build the spatial…
According to the theory of efficient coding, sensory systems are adapted to represent natural scenes with high fidelity and at minimal metabolic cost. Testing this hypothesis for sensory structures performing non-linear computations on high…
The meteoric rise in the adoption of deep neural networks as computational models of vision has inspired efforts to "align" these models with humans. One dimension of interest for alignment includes behavioral choices, but moving beyond…
Neuroscience theory posits that the brain's visual system coarsely identifies broad object categories via neural activation patterns, with similar objects producing similar neural responses. Artificial neural networks also have internal…