Related papers: Spike-based probabilistic inference with correlate…
An increasing body of evidence suggests that the trial-to-trial variability of spiking activity in the brain is not mere noise, but rather the reflection of a sampling-based encoding scheme for probabilistic computing. Since the precise…
Learning is based on synaptic plasticity, which affects and is driven by neural activity. Because pre- and postsynaptic spiking activity is shaped by randomness, the synaptic weights follow a stochastic process, requiring a probabilistic…
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…
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…
Neurons in the nervous system are submitted to distinct sources of noise, such as ionic-channel and synaptic noise, which introduces variability in their responses to repeated presentations of identical stimuli. This motivates the use of…
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…
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…
The correlated variability in the responses of a neural population to the repeated presentation of a sensory stimulus is a universally observed phenomenon. Such correlations have been studied in much detail, both with respect to their…
The apparent stochasticity of in-vivo neural circuits has long been hypothesized to represent a signature of ongoing stochastic inference in the brain. More recently, a theoretical framework for neural sampling has been proposed, which…
When an action potential is transmitted to a postsynaptic neuron, a small change in the postsynaptic neuron's membrane potential occurs. These small changes, known as a postsynaptic potentials (PSPs), are highly variable, and current models…
This paper addresses two main challenges facing systems neuroscience today: understanding the nature and function of a) cortical feedback between sensory areas and b) correlated variability. Starting from the old idea of perception as…
Recent studies have shown that synaptic unreliability is a robust and sufficient mechanism for inducing the stochasticity observed in cortex. Here, we introduce Synaptic Sampling Machines, a class of neural network models that uses synaptic…
Cortical sensory neurons are known to be highly variable, in the sense that responses evoked by identical stimuli often change dramatically from trial to trial. The origin of this variability is uncertain, but it is usually interpreted as…
Many real-world mission-critical applications require continual online learning from noisy data and real-time decision making with a defined confidence level. Probabilistic models and stochastic neural networks can explicitly handle…
Spiking neural network is a type of artificial neural network in which neurons communicate between each other with spikes. Spikes are identical Boolean events characterized by the time of their arrival. A spiking neuron has internal…
We consider a neural network with adapting synapses whose dynamics can be analitically computed. The model is made of $N$ neurons and each of them is connected to $K$ input neurons chosen at random in the network. The synapses are…
To date, it is still impossible to sample the entire mammalian brain with single-neuron precision. This forces one to either use spikes (focusing on few neurons) or to use coarse-sampled activity (averaging over many neurons, e.g. LFP).…
Noise is an inherent part of neuronal dynamics, and thus of the brain. It can be observed in neuronal activity at different spatiotemporal scales, including in neuronal membrane potentials, local field potentials, electroencephalography,…
The dynamics of local cortical networks are irregular, but correlated. Dynamic excitatory--inhibitory balance is a plausible mechanism that generates such irregular activity, but it remains unclear how balance is achieved and maintained in…
Neurons in the visual cortex are correlated in their variability. The presence of correlation impacts cortical processing because noise cannot be averaged out over many neurons. In an effort to understand the functional purpose of…