Related papers: Implicit embedding of prior probabilities in optim…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
A general method for deriving maximally informative sigmoidal tuning curves for neural systems with small normalized variability is presented. The optimal tuning curve is a nonlinear function of the cumulative distribution function of the…
The sigmoidal tuning curve that maximizes the mutual information for a Poisson neuron, or population of Poisson neurons, is obtained. The optimal tuning curve is found to have a discrete structure that results in a quantization of the input…
A central goal of neuroscience is to understand the representations formed by brain activity patterns and their connection to behavior. The classical approach is to investigate how individual neurons encode the stimuli and how their tuning…
The sensory-triggered activity of a neuron is typically characterized in terms of a tuning curve, which describes the neuron's average response as a function of a parameter that characterizes a physical stimulus. What determines the shapes…
The efficient coding theory postulates that single cells in a neuronal population should be optimally configured to efficiently encode information about a stimulus subject to biophysical constraints. This poses the question of how multiple…
Neural decoding may be formulated as dynamic state estimation (filtering) based on point process observations, a generally intractable problem. Numerical sampling techniques are often practically useful for the decoding of real neural data.…
The Bayesian brain hypothesis has been a leading theory in understanding perceptual decision-making under uncertainty. While extensive psychophysical evidence supports the notion of the brain performing Bayesian computations, how…
Sensory processing is often characterized as implementing probabilistic inference: networks of neurons compute posterior beliefs over unobserved causes given the sensory inputs. How these beliefs are computed and represented by neural…
A key question in neuroscience is at which level functional meaning emerges from biophysical phenomena. In most vertebrate systems, precise functions are assigned at the level of neural populations, while single-neurons are deemed…
Stimulus from the environment that guides behavior and informs decisions is encoded in the firing rates of neural populations. Each neuron in the populations, however, does not spike independently: spike events are correlated from cell to…
To compensate for sensory processing delays, the visual system must make predictions to ensure timely and appropriate behaviors. Recent work has found predictive information about the stimulus in neural populations early in vision…
The repeated presentation of an identical visual stimulus in the receptive field of a neuron may evoke different spiking patterns at each trial. Probabilistic methods are essential to understand the functional role of this variance within…
Transfer learning is a popular practice in deep neural networks, but fine-tuning of large number of parameters is a hard task due to the complex wiring of neurons between splitting layers and imbalance distributions of data in pretrained…
Neurons in the primary visual cortex are more or less selective for the orientation of a light bar used for stimulation. A broad distribution of individual grades of orientation selectivity has in fact been reported in all species. A…
Performative learning addresses the increasingly pervasive situations in which algorithmic decisions may induce changes in the data distribution as a consequence of their public deployment. We propose a novel view in which these…
We have developed an efficient information-maximization method for computing the optimal shapes of tuning curves of sensory neurons by optimizing the parameters of the underlying feedforward network model. When applied to the problem of…
Many properties of perceptual decision making are well-modeled by deep neural networks. However, such architectures typically treat decisions as instantaneous readouts, overlooking the temporal dynamics of the decision process. We present…
Neurons in the nervous system convey information to higher brain regions by the generation of spike trains. An important question in the field of computational neuroscience is how these sensory neurons encode environmental information in a…
Positive correlations in the activity of neurons are widely observed in the brain. Previous studies have shown these correlations to be detrimental to the fidelity of population codes or at best marginally favorable compared to independent…