Related papers: Obstructions to convexity in neural codes
Much of the information the brain processes and stores is temporal in nature - a spoken word or a handwritten signature, for example, is defined by how it unfolds in time. However, it remains unclear how neural circuits encode complex…
Most cortical inhibitory cell types exclusively express one of three genes, parvalbumin, somatostatin and 5HT3a. The visual responses of cortical neurons are affected not only by local cues, but also by visual context. As the inhibitory…
We formulate learning of a binary autoencoder as a biconvex optimization problem which learns from the pairwise correlations between encoded and decoded bits. Among all possible algorithms that use this information, ours finds the…
The invariance of natural objects under perceptual changes is possibly encoded in the brain by symmetries in the graph of synaptic connections. The graph can be established via unsupervised learning in a biologically plausible process…
Polar coding over a class of binary discrete memoryless channels with channel knowledge at the encoder is studied. It is shown that polar codes achieve the capacity of convex and one-sided classes of symmetric channels.
A pressing scientific challenge is to understand how brains work. Of particular interest is the neocortex,the part of the brain that is especially large in humans, capable of handling a wide variety of tasks including visual, auditory,…
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…
To evaluate the nature of the neural code in the cerebral cortex, we have used a combination of theory and experiment to assess how information is represented in a realistic cortical population response. We have shown how a sensory stimulus…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have had great success in many real-world applications and have also been used to model visual processing in the brain. However, these networks are quite brittle - small changes in the input image can…
Networks of neurons in some brain areas are flexible enough to encode new memories quickly. Using a standard firing rate model of recurrent networks, we develop a theory of flexible memory networks. Our main results characterize networks…
Sparse code formation in the primary visual cortex (V1) has been inspiration for many state-of-the-art visual recognition systems. To stimulate this behavior, networks are trained networks under mathematical constraint of sparsity or…
The central problem with understanding brain and mind is the neural code issue: understanding the matter of our brain as basis for the phenomena of our mind. The richness with which our mind represents our environment, the parsimony of…
Several efforts are currently underway to decipher the connectome or parts thereof in a variety of organisms. Ascertaining the detailed physiological properties of all the neurons in these connectomes, however, is out of the scope of such…
It is often hypothesized that a crucial role for recurrent connections in the brain is to constrain the set of possible response patterns, thereby shaping the neural code. This implies the existence of neural codes that cannot arise solely…
A neural code on $ n $ neurons is a collection of subsets of the set $ [n]=\{1,2,\dots,n\} $. Curto et al. \cite{curto2013neural} associated a ring $\mathcal{R}_{\mathcal{C}}$ (neural ring) to a neural code $\mathcal{C}$. A special class of…
The hippocampus encodes space through a striking gradient of place field sizes along its dorsal-ventral axis, yet the principles generating this continuous gradient from discrete grid cell inputs remain debated. We propose a unified…
It is a principal open question whether noninvasive imaging methods in humans can decode information encoded at a spatial scale as fine as the basic functional unit of cortex: cortical columns. We addressed this question in five…
In the brain, neural activity undergoes directed flows between states, thus breaking time-reversal symmetry. At the same time, animals also exhibit irreversible flows between behavioral states. Yet it remains unclear whether -- and how --…
There has been a long history of works showing that neural networks have hard time extrapolating beyond the training set. A recent study by Balestriero et al. (2021) challenges this view: defining interpolation as the state of belonging to…
We present a deep, fully convolutional neural network that learns to route a circuit layout net with appropriate choice of metal tracks and wire class combinations. Inputs to the network are the encoded layouts containing spatial location…