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The mammalian brain could contain dense and sparse network connectivity structures, including both excitatory and inhibitory neurons, but is without any clearly defined output layer. The neurons have time constants, which mean that the…
This review synthesizes advances in predictive processing within the sensory cortex. Predictive processing theorizes that the brain continuously predicts sensory inputs, refining neuronal responses by highlighting prediction errors. We…
Functional networks provide a topological description of activity patterns in the brain, as they stem from the propagation of neural activity on the underlying anatomical or structural network of synaptic connections. This latter is well…
Complex systems in the real world can be modeled as a network of connected components. The human brain, as a network of neurons among which the interactions cause perception, is a complex network. Synchronization is a dynamical phenomenon…
Population-based learning paradigms, including evolutionary strategies, Population-Based Training (PBT), and recent model-merging methods, combine fast within-model optimisation with slower population-level adaptation. Despite their…
Systems neuroscience relies on two complementary views of neural data, characterized by single neuron tuning curves and analysis of population activity. These two perspectives combine elegantly in neural latent variable models that…
Synaptic plasticity allows cortical circuits to learn new tasks and to adapt to changing environments. How do cortical circuits use plasticity to acquire functions such as decision-making or working memory? Neurons are connected in complex…
This paper describes some biologically-inspired processes that could be used to build the sort of networks that we associate with the human brain. New to this paper, a 'refined' neuron will be proposed. This is a group of neurons that by…
Recurrent networks are a special class of artificial neural systems that use their internal states to perform computing tasks for machine learning. One of its state-of-the-art developments, i.e. reservoir computing (RC), uses the internal…
Neurophysiologists are nowadays able to record from a large number of extracellular electrodes and to extract, from the raw data, the sequences of action potentials or spikes generated by many neurons. Unfortunately these ''many neurons''…
Neural circuits are able to perform computations under very diverse conditions and requirements. The required computations impose clear constraints on their fine-tuning: a rapid and maximally informative response to stimuli in general…
The proposed analysis of the currently available experimental results concerning the neural cell activity in the brain area known as hippocampus suggests a particular mechanism of spatial information and memory processing. Below it is…
Reservoir computing is a machine learning paradigm that transforms the transient dynamics of high-dimensional nonlinear systems for processing time-series data. Although reservoir computing was initially proposed to model information…
To create state-of-the-art models for many downstream tasks, it has become common practice to fine-tune a pre-trained large vision model. However, it remains an open question of how to best determine which of the many possible model…
Can neural networks learn goal-directed behaviour using similar strategies to the brain, by combining the relationships between the current state of the organism and the consequences of future actions? Recent work has shown that recurrent…
Neuroscience research has made immense progress over the last decade, but our understanding of the brain remains fragmented and piecemeal: the dream of probing an arbitrary brain region and automatically reading out the information encoded…
The study of population dynamics originated with early sociological works but has since extended into many fields, including biology, epidemiology, evolutionary game theory, and economics. Most studies on population dynamics focus on the…
Attractor dynamics are a fundamental computational motif in neural circuits, supporting diverse cognitive functions through stable, self-sustaining patterns of neural activity. In these lecture notes, we review four key examples that…
The population activity of random networks of excitatory and inhibitory leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons has been studied extensively. In particular, a state of asynchronous activity with low firing rates and low pairwise correlations…
We focus on robot navigation in crowded environments. The challenge of predicting the motion of a crowd around a robot makes it hard to ensure human safety and comfort. Recent approaches often employ end-to-end techniques for robot control…