Related papers: On the optimality of grid cells
Human brains respond to semantic features of presented stimuli with different neurons. It is then curious whether modern deep neural networks admit a similar behavior pattern. Specifically, this paper finds a small cluster of neurons in a…
Quantifying the degree of dissimilarity between two probability distributions on a finite metric space is a fundamental task in Computer Science and Computer Vision. A natural dissimilarity measure based on optimal transport is the Earth…
Manifold learning is a central task in modern statistics and data science. Many datasets (cells, documents, images, molecules) can be represented as point clouds embedded in a high dimensional ambient space, however the degrees of freedom…
Grid maps, especially occupancy grid maps, are ubiquitous in many mobile robot applications. To simplify the process of learning the map, grid maps subdivide the world into a grid of cells whose occupancies are independently estimated using…
The visual systems of many mammals, including humans, is able to integrate the geometric information of visual stimuli and to perform cognitive tasks already at the first stages of the cortical processing. This is thought to be the result…
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…
Coverage and connectivity issues of three-dimensional (3D) networks are addressed in [2], but that work assumes that a node can be placed at any arbitrary location. In this work, we drop that assumption and rather assume that nodes are…
Electrophysiological devices are critical for mapping eloquent and diseased brain regions and for therapeutic neuromodulation in clinical settings and are extensively utilized for research in brain-machine interfaces. However, the existing…
This paper gives an in-depth theoretical analysis of the direction and speed selectivity properties of idealized models of the spatio-temporal receptive fields of simple cells and complex cells, based on the generalized Gaussian derivative…
Unveiling feeder topologies from data is of paramount importance to advance situational awareness and proper utilization of smart resources in power distribution grids. This tutorial summarizes, contrasts, and establishes useful links…
We characterize the computation of motion in the fly visual system as a mapping from the high dimensional space of signals in the retinal photodetector array to the probability of generating an action potential in a motion sensitive neuron.…
Biological transport networks are highly optimized structures that ensure power-efficient distribution of fluids across various domains, including animal vasculature and plant venation. Theoretically, these networks can be described as…
Random walks can reveal communities or clusters in networks, because they are more likely to stay within a cluster than leave it. Thus, one family of community detection algorithms uses random walks to measure distance between pairs of…
In the wake of recent advances in experimental methods in neuroscience, the ability to record in-vivo neuronal activity from awake animals has become feasible. The availability of such rich and detailed physiological measurements calls for…
Most neurons in peripheral sensory pathways initially respond vigorously when a preferred stimulus is presented, but adapt as stimulation continues. It is unclear how this phenomenon affects stimulus representation in the later stages of…
Over the last four decades, the amazing success of deep learning has been driven by the use of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) as the main optimization technique. The default implementation for the computation of the gradient for SGD is…
While many neural networks focus on layers to process information, the GAIN model uses a grid-based structure to improve biological plausibility and the dynamics of the model. The grid structure helps neurons to interact with their closest…
Stochastic Model Predictive Control has proved to be an efficient method to plan trajectories in uncertain environments, e.g., for autonomous vehicles. Chance constraints ensure that the probability of collision is bounded by a predefined…
We develop of a line of work initiated by Curto and Itskov towards understanding the amount of information contained in the spike trains of hippocampal place cells via topology considerations. Previously, it was established that simply…
Recent years have seen dramatic progress in the development of techniques for measuring the activity and connectivity of large populations of neurons in the brain. However, as these techniques grow ever more powerful---allowing us to even…