Related papers: A Radically New Theory of how the Brain Represents…
There is increasing realization in neuroscience that information is represented in the brain, e.g., neocortex, hippocampus, in the form sparse distributed codes (SDCs), a kind of cell assembly. Two essential questions are: a) how are such…
Behavioral experiments on humans and animals suggest that the brain performs probabilistic inference to interpret its environment. Here we present a new general-purpose, biologically-plausible neural implementation of approximate inference.…
It has been proposed that populations of neurons process information in terms of probability density functions (PDFs) of analog variables. Such analog variables range, for example, from target luminance and depth on the sensory interface to…
In recent years, research unveiled more and more evidence for the so-called Bayesian Brain Paradigm, i.e. the human brain is interpreted as a probabilistic inference machine and Bayesian modelling approaches are hence used successfully. One…
This perspective piece is the result of a Generative Adversarial Collaboration (GAC) tackling the question `How does neural activity represent probability distributions?'. We have addressed three major obstacles to progress on answering…
This paper shows how sparse, high-dimensional probability distributions could be represented by neurons with exponential compression. The representation is a novel application of compressive sensing to sparse probability distributions…
Sensory processing is often characterized as implementing probabilistic inference: networks of neurons compute posterior beliefs over unobserved causes given the sensory inputs. How these beliefs are computed and represented by neural…
The highly irregular spiking activity of cortical neurons and behavioral variability suggest that the brain could operate in a fundamentally probabilistic way. Mimicking how the brain implements and learns probabilistic computation could be…
A steadily increasing body of evidence suggests that the brain performs probabilistic inference to interpret and respond to sensory input and that trial-to-trial variability in neural activity plays an important role. The neural sampling…
How intelligence arises from the brain is a central problem in science. A crucial aspect of intelligence is dealing with uncertainty -- developing good predictions about one's environment, and converting these predictions into decisions.…
Living organisms survive and multiply even though they have uncertain and incomplete information about their environment and imperfect models to predict the consequences of their actions. Bayesian models have been proposed to face this…
General results from statistical learning theory suggest to understand not only brain computations, but also brain plasticity as probabilistic inference. But a model for that has been missing. We propose that inherently stochastic features…
How neural networks in the human brain represent commonsense knowledge, and complete related reasoning tasks is an important research topic in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Although the…
It is widely believed that the brain performs approximate probabilistic inference to estimate causal variables in the world from ambiguous sensory data. To understand these computations, we need to analyze how information is represented and…
Conventional and current wisdom assumes that the brain represents probability as a continuous number to many decimal places. This assumption seems implausible given finite and scarce resources in the brain. Quantization is an information…
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are distributed trainable systems whose computing elements, or neurons, are characterized by internal analog dynamics and by digital and sparse synaptic communications. The sparsity of the synaptic spiking…
Neural-network models of high-level brain functions such as memory recall and reasoning often rely on the presence of stochasticity. The majority of these models assumes that each neuron in the functional network is equipped with its own…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are distributed trainable systems whose computing elements, or neurons, are characterized by internal analog dynamics and by digital and sparse synaptic communications. The sparsity of the synaptic spiking…
To understand cognitive reasoning in the brain, it has been proposed that symbols and compositions of symbols are represented by activity patterns (vectors) in a large population of neurons. Formal models implementing this idea [Plate…
Current theories of perception suggest that the brain represents features of the world as probability distributions, but can such uncertain foundations provide the basis for everyday vision? Perceiving objects and scenes requires knowing…