Related papers: On the optimality of grid cells

We typically think of cells as responding to external signals independently by regulating their gene expression levels, yet they often locally exchange information and coordinate. Can such spatial coupling be of benefit for conveying…

Neurons communicate with downstream systems via sparse and incredibly brief electrical pulses, or spikes. Using these events, they control various targets such as neuromuscular units, neurosecretory systems, and other neurons in connected…

Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…

We present a new method to identify connected components on triangular grids used in atmosphere and climate models to discretize the horizontal dimension. In contrast to structured latitude-longitude grids, triangular grids are unstructured…

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models enable real-time scene generation but are hindered by suboptimal pixel-aligned primitive placement, which relies on a dense, rigid grid that limits both quality and efficiency. We introduce a…

Deep neural networks have made tremendous gains in emulating human-like intelligence, and have been used increasingly as ways of understanding how the brain may solve the complex computational problems on which this relies. However, these…

The origin of rigidity in disordered materials is an outstanding open problem in statistical physics. Previously, a class of 2D cellular models has been shown to undergo a rigidity transition controlled by a mechanical parameter that…

Highly-optimized complex transport networks serve crucial functions in many man-made and natural systems such as power grids and plant or animal vasculature. Often, the relevant optimization functional is non-convex and characterized by…

The application of graph neural networks (GNNs) to the domain of electrical power grids has high potential impact on smart grid monitoring. Even though there is a natural correspondence of power flow to message-passing in GNNs, their…

The brain has no direct access to physical stimuli, but only to the spiking activity evoked in sensory organs. It is unclear how the brain can structure its representation of the world based on differences between those noisy, correlated…

The goal of this thesis is to improve our understanding of the internal mechanisms by which deep artificial neural networks create meaningful representations and are able to generalize. We focus on the challenge of characterizing the…

We consider here how to separate multidimensional signals into two categories, such that the binary decision transmits the maximum possible information transmitted about those signals. Our motivation comes from the nervous system, where…

We consider the information transmission problem in neurons and its possible implications for learning in neural networks. Our approach is based on recent developments in statistical physics and complexity science. Combining sensory…

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…

We present a method for learning "spectrally descriptive" edge weights for graphs. We generalize a previously known distance measure on graphs (Graph Diffusion Distance), thereby allowing it to be tuned to minimize an arbitrary loss…

This paper describes applications of two neural networks to improve drift chamber position measurements. One network calculates a data-driven estimate of the drift cell time-to-distance relationship that is conventionally estimated by a…

Here we characterized an information measure for cell polarity that applies to non-motile cells responding to a chemical gradient. The central idea is that polarization represents information about the direction of the gradient. We applied…

Many contemporary studies utilize grid-based models for neural field representation, but a systematic analysis of grid-based models is still missing, hindering the improvement of those models. Therefore, this paper introduces a theoretical…

Understanding the properties of neural networks trained via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is at the heart of the theory of deep learning. In this work, we take a mean-field view, and consider a two-layer ReLU network trained via SGD for…

The lack of analytical models describing diffusion time dependence at intermediate time scales in complex tissue microstructure limits the accurate quantification of extracellular diffusivity and tissue microstructure. We introduce TRACED,…