Related papers: Beta Distribution of Human MTL Neuron Sparsity: A …
We examine how the prior probability distribution of a sensory variable in the environment influences the optimal allocation of neurons and spikes in a population that represents that variable. We start with a conventional response model,…
A core component present in many successful neural network architectures, is an MLP block of two fully connected layers with a non-linear activation in between. An intriguing phenomenon observed empirically, including in transformer…
Heterogeneity of firing rate statistics is known to have severe consequences on neural coding. Recent experimental recordings in weakly electric fish indicate that the distribution-width of superficial pyramidal cell firing rates (trial-…
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. To investigate…
In a recent study the initial rise of the mutual information between the firing rates of N neurons and a set of p discrete stimuli has been analytically evaluated, under the assumption that neurons fire independently of one another to each…
We investigate the efficient transmission and processing of weak, subthreshold signals in a realistic neural medium in the presence of different levels of the underlying noise. Assuming Hebbian weights for maximal synaptic conductances --…
In the human brain, the allowed patterns of activity are constrained by the correlations between brain regions. Yet it remains unclear which correlations -- and how many -- are needed to predict large-scale neural activity. Here, we present…
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…
Batched sparse (BATS) code is a class of batched network code that can achieve a close-to-optimal rate when an optimal degree distribution is provided. We observed that most probability masses in this optimal distribution are very small,…
In many organisms the expression levels of each gene are controlled by the activation levels of known "Transcription Factors" (TF). A problem of considerable interest is that of estimating the "Transcription Regulation Networks" (TRN)…
Spike sorting refers to the problem of assigning action potentials observed in extra-cellular recordings of neural activity to the neuron(s) from which they originate. We cast this problem as one of learning a convolutional dictionary from…
In recurrent networks of leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons, mean-field theory has proven successful in describing various statistical properties of neuronal activity at equilibrium, such as firing rate distributions. Mean-field theory…
Neural oscillations are universal phenomena and can be observed at different levels of neural systems, from single neuron to macroscopic brain. The frequency of those oscillations are related to the brain functions. However, little is know…
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…
The result of computational operations performed at the single cell level are coded into sequences of action potentials (APs). In the cerebral cortex, due to its columnar organization, large number of neurons are involved in any individual…
Meta-analysis is a powerful tool to synthesize findings from multiple studies. The normal-normal random-effects model is widely used to account for between-study heterogeneity. However, meta-analysis of sparse data, which may arise when the…
Languages are not created randomly but rather to communicate information. There is a strong association between languages and their underlying meanings, resulting in a sparse joint distribution that is heavily peaked according to their…
There has been a lot of interest in understanding what information is captured by hidden representations of language models (LMs). Typically, interpretation methods i) do not guarantee that the model actually uses the encoded information,…
In this paper we present a simple microscopic stochastic model describing short term plasticity within a large homogeneous network of interacting neurons. Each neuron is represented by its membrane potential and by the residual calcium…
Concerns about interpretability, computational resources, and principled inductive priors have motivated efforts to engineer sparse neural models for NLP tasks. If sparsity is important for NLP, might well-trained neural models naturally…