Related papers: Trade-off between sensitivity and selectivity in o…

Cells often have tens of thousands of receptors, even though only a few activated receptors can trigger full cellular responses. Reasons for the overabundance of receptors remain unclear. We suggest that, in certain conditions, the large…

We present a model of a coupled system of the olfactory bulb and cortex. Odor inputs to the epithelium are transformed to oscillatory bulbar activities. The cortex recognizes the odor by resonating to the bulbar oscillating pattern when the…

Sometimes it is not enough for a DNN to produce an outcome. For example, in applications such as healthcare, users need to understand the rationale of the decisions. Therefore, it is imperative to develop algorithms to learn models with…

For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from generation to…

Living cells deploy many resources to sense their environments, including receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and fuel. However, it is not known which resources fundamentally limit the precision of sensing, like weak links in a…

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…

A key step in many perceptual decision tasks is the integration of sensory inputs over time, but fundamental questions remain about how this is accomplished in neural circuits. One possibility is to balance decay modes of membranes and…

Astounding properties of biological sensors can often be mapped onto a dynamical system in the vicinity a bifurcation. For mammalian hearing, a Hopf bifurcation description has been shown to work across a whole range of scales, from…

As we exhaust methods that reduces variance without introducing bias, reducing variance in experiments often requires accepting some bias, using methods like winsorization or surrogate metrics. While this bias-variance tradeoff can be…

Associating multiple sensory cues with a single experience or object is a fundamental process that improves object recognition and memory performance. However, neural mechanisms that bind sensory features during learning and augment memory…

Cells constantly need to monitor the state of the environment to detect changes and timely respond. The detection of concentration changes of a ligand by a set of receptors can be cast as a problem of hypothesis testing, and the cell viewed…

Learning algorithms need bias to generalize and perform better than random guessing. We examine the flexibility (expressivity) of biased algorithms. An expressive algorithm can adapt to changing training data, altering its outcome based on…

In this paper we explore relevant electrical properties of two olfactory receptors (ORs), one from rat OR I7 and the other from human OR 17-40, which are of interest for the realization of smell nanobiosensors. The investigation compares…

Observational learning often involves congestion: an agent gets lower payoff from an action when more predecessors have taken that action. This preference to act differently from previous agents may paradoxically increase all but one…

In recommendation settings, there is an apparent trade-off between the goals of accuracy (to recommend items a user is most likely to want) and diversity (to recommend items representing a range of categories). As such, real-world…

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…

Living systems continually respond to signals from the surrounding environment. Survival requires that their responses adapt quickly and robustly to the changes in the environment. One particularly challenging example is olfactory…

This paper proposes a neuronal circuitry layout and synaptic plasticity principles that allow the (pyramidal) neuron to act as a "combinatorial switch". Namely, the neuron learns to be more prone to generate spikes given those combinations…

A recent Science paper (Bushdid et al, 2014)[1] proposed that humans can discriminate between at least a trillion olfactory stimuli. Here we show that this claim is the result of a fragile estimation framework capable of producing nearly…

We present a model of an olfactory system that performs odor segmentation. Based on the anatomy and physiology of natural olfactory systems, it consists of a pair of coupled modules, bulb and cortex. The bulb encodes the odor inputs as…