Related papers: Adaptation of olfactory receptor abundances for ef…

To date a number of studies have shown that receptive field shapes of early sensory neurons can be reproduced by optimizing coding efficiency of natural stimulus ensembles. A still unresolved question is whether the efficient coding…

The human brain encodes stimuli from the environment into representations that form a sensory perception of the world. Despite recent advances in understanding visual and auditory perception, olfactory perception remains an under-explored…

Cells continuously sense their surroundings to detect modifications and generate responses. Very often changes in extracellular concentrations initiate signaling cascades that eventually result in changes in gene expression. Increasing…

Developments in reinforcement learning (RL) have allowed algorithms to achieve impressive performance in highly complex, but largely static problems. In contrast, biological learning seems to value efficiency of adaptation to a…

To perform recognition, molecules must locate and specifically bind their targets within a noisy biochemical environment with many look-alikes. Molecular recognition processes, especially the induced-fit mechanism, are known to involve…

We present a generalized theoretical framework for olfactory representation and plasticity, using the theory of smooth manifolds and sheaves to depict categorical odor learning via distributed neural computation. Beginning with the space of…

This paper considers neural representation through the lens of active inference, a normative framework for understanding brain function. It delves into how living organisms employ generative models to minimize the discrepancy between…

The application of deep learning techniques on aroma-chemicals has resulted in models more accurate than human experts at predicting olfactory qualities. However, public research in this domain has been limited to predicting the qualities…

Communication signals often comprise an array of colors, lines, spots, notes or odors that are arranged in complex patterns, melodies or blends. Receiver perception is assumed to influence preference and thus the evolution of signal design,…

Today, mobile robots are expected to carry out increasingly complex tasks in multifarious, real-world environments. Often, the tasks require a certain semantic understanding of the workspace. Consider, for example, spoken instructions from…

Cells measure concentrations of external ligands by capturing ligand molecules with cell surface receptors. The numbers of molecules captured by different receptors co-vary because they depend on the same extrinsic ligand fluctuations.…

Learning to automatically perceive smell is becoming increasingly important with applications in monitoring the quality of food and drinks for healthy living. In todays age of proliferation of internet of things devices, the deployment of…

The reliable detection of environmental molecules in the presence of noise is an important cellular function, yet the underlying computational mechanisms are not well understood. We introduce a model of two interacting sensors which allows…

Autonomous neural systems must efficiently process information in a wide range of novel environments, which may have very different statistical properties. We consider the problem of how to optimally distribute receptors along a…

Mitral cells of the olfactory bulb form sparse representations of the odorants and transmit this information to the cortex. The olfactory code carried by the mitral cells is sparser than the inputs that they receive. In this study we…

Cells use surface receptors to estimate the concentration of external ligands. Limits on the accuracy of such estimations have been well studied for pairs of ligand and receptor species. However, the environment typically contains many…

In natural scenes, objects generally appear together with other objects. Yet, theoretical studies of neural population coding typically focus on the encoding of single objects in isolation. Experimental studies suggest that neural responses…

Redundancies and correlations in the responses of sensory neurons seem to waste neural resources but can carry cues about structured stimuli and may help the brain to correct for response errors. To assess how the retina negotiates this…

Mitral cells, the principal neurons in the olfactory bulb, respond to odorants by firing bursts of action potentials called sharp events. A given cell produces a sharp event at a fixed phase during the sniff cycle in response to a given…

In this paper, we propose a novel concept for engineered molecular communication (MC) systems inspired by animal olfaction. We focus on a multi-user scenario where transmitters employ unique mixtures of different types of signaling…