Related papers: Characterizing the nonlinear structure of shared v…
Our daily perceptual experience is driven by different neural mechanisms that yield multisensory interaction as the interplay between exogenous stimuli and endogenous expectations. While the interaction of multisensory cues according to…
Localized receptive fields -- neurons that are selective for certain contiguous spatiotemporal features of their input -- populate early sensory regions of the mammalian brain. Unsupervised learning algorithms that optimize explicit…
We consider the setting where a collection of time series, modeled as random processes, evolve in a causal manner, and one is interested in learning the graph governing the relationships of these processes. A special case of wide interest…
Most models of neurons incorporate a capacitor to account for the marked capacitive behavior exhibited by the cell membrane. However, such capacitance is widely considered constant, thereby neglecting the possible effects of time-dependent…
Habituation - a phenomenon in which a dynamical system exhibits a diminishing response to repeated stimulations that eventually recovers when the stimulus is withheld - is universally observed in living systems from animals to unicellular…
Learning interpretable representations of neural dynamics at a population level is a crucial first step to understanding how observed neural activity relates to perception and behavior. Models of neural dynamics often focus on either…
With our ability to record more neurons simultaneously, making sense of these data is a challenge. Functional connectivity is one popular way to study the relationship between multiple neural signals. Correlation-based methods are a set of…
High-level visual brain regions contain subareas in which neurons appear to respond more strongly to examples of a particular semantic category, like faces or bodies, rather than objects. However, recent work has shown that while this…
Human perception and behavior are affected by the situational context, in particular during social interactions. A recent study demonstrated that humans perceive visual stimuli differently depending on whether they do the task by themselves…
The combination of new recording techniques in neuroscience and powerful inference methods recently held the promise to recover useful effective models, at the single neuron or network level, directly from observed data. The value of a…
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…
Recent advances in recording technology have allowed neuroscientists to monitor activity from thousands of neurons simultaneously. Latent variable models are increasingly valuable for distilling these recordings into compact and…
In a recent study the initial rise of the mutual information between the firing rates of N neurons and a set of p discrete stimuli has been analytically evaluated, under the assumption that neurons fire independently of one another to each…
Studies of the dynamics of nonlinear recurrent neural networks often assume independent and identically distributed couplings, but large-scale connectomics data indicate that biological neural circuits exhibit markedly different…
In this paper, we investigate a scenario in which a robot learns a low-dimensional representation of a door given a video of the door opening or closing. This representation can be used to infer door-related parameters and predict the…
In this paper, we propose a new scheme for modelling the diverse behavior of neurons. We introduce the conditional activation, in which a neurons activation function is dynamically modified by a control signal. We apply this method to…
Traveling waves of neural activity emerge in cortical networks both spontaneously and in response to stimuli. The spatiotemporal structure of waves can indicate the information they encode and the physiological processes that sustain them.…
Differential graphical models are designed to represent the difference between the conditional dependence structures of two groups, thus are of particular interest for scientific investigation. Motivated by modern applications, this…
The brain modifies its synaptic strengths during learning in order to better adapt to its environment. However, the underlying plasticity rules that govern learning are unknown. Many proposals have been suggested, including Hebbian…
Spontaneous cortical population activity exhibits a multitude of oscillatory patterns, which often display synchrony during slow-wave sleep or under certain anesthetics and stay asynchronous during quiet wakefulness. The mechanisms behind…