Related papers: Analysis of neuronal sequences using pairwise bias…
A fundamental challenge in neuroscience is to understand what structure in the world is represented in spatially distributed patterns of neural activity from multiple single-trial measurements. This is often accomplished by learning a…
Humans and animals exhibit a range of interesting behaviors in dynamic environments, and it is unclear how our brains actively reformat this dense sensory information to enable these behaviors. Experimental neuroscience is undergoing a…
This PhD thesis is focused on the central idea that single neurons in the brain should be regarded as temporally precise and highly complex spatio-temporal pattern recognizers. This is opposed to the prevalent view of biological neurons as…
The brain is targeted for processing temporal sequence information. It remains largely unclear how the brain learns to store and retrieve sequence memories. Here, we study how recurrent networks of binary neurons learn sequence attractors…
A popular theory of perceptual processing holds that the brain learns both a generative model of the world and a paired recognition model using variational Bayesian inference. Most hypotheses of how the brain might learn these models assume…
In this article we present a biologically inspired model of activation of memory items in a sequence. Our model produces two types of sequences, corresponding to two different types of cerebral functions: activation of regular or irregular…
Mathematical modeling has broad applications in neuroscience whether modeling the dynamics of a single synapse or an entire network of neurons. In Part I, we model vesicle replenishment and release at the photoreceptor synapse to better…
It is widely believed that learning good representations is one of the main reasons for the success of deep neural networks. Although highly intuitive, there is a lack of theory and systematic approach quantitatively characterizing what…
Can neural networks learn goal-directed behaviour using similar strategies to the brain, by combining the relationships between the current state of the organism and the consequences of future actions? Recent work has shown that recurrent…
Bayesian models of cognition hypothesize that human brains make sense of data by representing probability distributions and applying Bayes' rule to find the best explanation for available data. Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying…
The brain's spatial orientation system uses different neuron ensembles to aid in environment-based navigation. Two of the ways brains encode spatial information is through head direction cells and grid cells. Brains use head direction cells…
While deep neural networks take loose inspiration from neuroscience, it is an open question how seriously to take the analogies between artificial deep networks and biological neuronal systems. Interestingly, recent work has shown that deep…
People use rich prior knowledge about the world in order to efficiently learn new concepts. These priors - also known as "inductive biases" - pertain to the space of internal models considered by a learner, and they help the learner make…
Animals learn to predict external contingencies from experience through a process of conditioning. A natural mechanism for conditioning is stimulus substitution, whereby the neuronal response to a stimulus with no prior behavioral…
We present a simple linear regression based approach for learning the weights and biases of a neural network, as an alternative to standard gradient based backpropagation. The present work is exploratory in nature, and we restrict the…
Recognition of every word is accomplished by close collaboration of bottom-up sub-word and word recognition neural networks with top-down cognitive word context expectations. The utility of this context appropriate collaboration is…
When people learn mathematical patterns or sequences, they are able to identify the concepts (or rules) underlying those patterns. Having learned the underlying concepts, humans are also able to generalize those concepts to other numbers,…
Animals rely on different decision strategies when faced with ambiguous or uncertain cues. Depending on the context, decisions may be biased towards events that were most frequently experienced in the past, or be more explorative. A…
Learning and interpreting the structure of the environment is an innate feature of biological systems, and is integral to guiding flexible behaviours for evolutionary viability. The concept of a cognitive map has emerged as one of the…
Sequences of correlated binary patterns can represent many time-series data including text, movies, and biological signals. These patterns may be described by weighted combinations of a few dominant structures that underpin specific…