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Living organisms rely on molecular networks, such as gene circuits and signaling pathways, for information processing and robust decision-making in crowded, noisy environments. Recent advances show that interacting biomolecules…
Guiding behavior requires the brain to make predictions about future sensory inputs. Here we show that efficient predictive computation starts at the earliest stages of the visual system. We estimate how much information groups of retinal…
The Information Plane is a conceptual framework used to analyze the flow of information in neural networks, but traditional methods based on activations may not fully capture the dynamics of information processing. This paper introduces a…
The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)science over recent decades. Here I present a…
To guide behavior, the brain extracts relevant features from high-dimensional data streamed by sensory organs. Neuroscience experiments demonstrate that the processing of sensory inputs by cortical neurons is modulated by instructive…
The human brain is a dynamical system whose extremely complex sensor-driven neural processes give rise to conceptual, logical cognition. Understanding the interplay between nonlinear neural dynamics and concept-level cognition remains a…
An established normative approach for understanding the algorithmic basis of neural computation is to derive online algorithms from principled computational objectives and evaluate their compatibility with anatomical and physiological…
Recent research revealed a considerable lack of reliability for user feedback when interacting with adaptive systems, often denoted as user noise or human uncertainty. Moreover, this lack of reliability holds striking impacts for the…
Learning and decision making in the brain are key processes critical to survival, and yet are processes implemented by non-ideal biological building blocks which can impose significant error. We explore quantitatively how the brain might…
In physics we often use very simple models to describe systems with many degrees of freedom, but it is not clear why or how this success can be transferred to the more complex biological context. We consider models for the joint…
The brain is a nonlinear and highly Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). This RNN is surprisingly plastic and supports our astonishing ability to learn and execute complex tasks. However, learning is incredibly complicated due to the brain's…
Many networks in the brain are sparsely connected, and the brain eliminates synapses during development and learning. How could the brain decide which synapses to prune? In a recurrent network, determining the importance of a synapse…
We propose a new interpretability method for neural networks, which is based on a novel mathematico-philosophical theory of reasons. Our method computes a vector for each neuron, called its reasons vector. We then can compute how strongly…
Advancing our knowledge of how the brain processes information remains a key challenge in neuroscience. This thesis combines three different approaches to the study of the dynamics of neural networks and their encoding representations: a…
Extending the intelligence of sensors to the data-acquisition process - deciding whether to sample or not - can result in transformative energy-efficiency gains. However, making such a decision in a deterministic manner involves risk of…
In quantum mechanics, a norm squared wave function can be interpreted as the probability density that describes the likelihood of a particle to be measured in a given position or momentum. This statistical property is at the core of the…
Neural network design has utilized flexible nonlinear processes which can mimic biological systems, but has suffered from a lack of traceability in the resulting network. Graphical probabilistic models ground network design in probabilistic…
We introduce a class of neural networks derived from probabilistic models in the form of Bayesian belief networks. By imposing additional assumptions about the nature of the probabilistic models represented in the belief networks, we derive…
Dynamical wiring and rewiring in neural networks are carried out by activity-dependent growth and retraction of axons and dendrites, guided by gudance molecules, released by target cells. Experience-dependent structural changes in cortical…
Understanding neurocognitive computations will require not just localizing cognitive information distributed throughout the brain but also determining how that information got there. We review recent advances in linking empirical and…