Related papers: A Geometric Framework for Odor Representation
Olfaction -- how molecules are perceived as odors to humans -- remains poorly understood. Recently, the principal odor map (POM) was introduced to digitize the olfactory properties of single compounds. However, smells in real life are not…
We analyze the psychophysical responses of human observers to an ensemble of monomolecular odorants. Each odorant is characterized by a set of 146 perceptual descriptors obtained from a database of odor character profiles. Each odorant is…
We explore a suite of generative modelling techniques to efficiently navigate and explore the complex landscapes of odor and the broader chemical space. Unlike traditional approaches, we not only generate molecules but also predict the odor…
Understanding how molecular structure gives rise to odor perception remains a long-standing challenge, with ongoing debate over whether olfaction is primarily governed by molecular shape, vibrational properties, or their interplay at the…
Predicting the relationship between a molecule's structure and its odor remains a difficult, decades-old task. This problem, termed quantitative structure-odor relationship (QSOR) modeling, is an important challenge in chemistry, impacting…
This thesis is designed to be a self-contained exposition of the neurobiological and mathematical aspects of sensory perception, memory, and learning with a bias towards olfaction. The final chapters introduce a new approach to modeling…
Studies of insect olfactory processing indicate that odors are represented by rich spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity. These patterns are very difficult to predict a priori, yet they are stimulus specific and reliable upon repeated…
The olfactory system employs responses of an ensemble of odorant receptors (ORs) to sense molecules and to generate olfactory percepts. Here we hypothesized that ORs can be viewed as 3D spatial filters that extract molecular features…
Predicting olfactory perception directly from molecular structure is central to fragrance design that plays a role in a wide range of industries, such as perfumery, food and beverage, and health care. Among olfactory attributes, odor…
Odor visualization translates odor information and perception into visual outcomes and arouses the corresponding olfactory synesthesia, surpassing the spatial limitation that odors can only be perceived where they are present. Traditional…
Olfactory perception plays a critical role in both human and organismal interactions, yet understanding of its underlying mechanisms and influencing factors remain insufficient. Molecular structures influence odor perception through…
The olfactory system removes correlations in natural odors using a network of inhibitory neurons in the olfactory bulb. It has been proposed that this network integrates the response from all olfactory receptors and inhibits them equally.…
Navigation by scent is a capability in robotic systems that is rising in demand. However, current methods often suffer from ambiguities, particularly when robots misattribute odours to incorrect objects due to limitations in olfactory…
Animals smelling in the real world use a small number of receptors to sense a vast number of natural molecular mixtures, and proceed to learn arbitrary associations between odors and valences. Here, we propose a new interpretation of how…
We introduce and study an artificial neural network, inspired by the probabilistic Receptor Affinity Distribution model of olfaction. Our system consists on N sensory neurons whose outputs converge on a single processing linear threshold…
The olfactory sense measures the chemical composition of the environment using a diverse array of olfactory receptors. In vertebrates, the olfactory receptors reside in a mucus layer in the nasal cavity and can thus only detect odorants…
Olfaction lies at the intersection of chemical structure, neural encoding, and linguistic perception, yet existing representation methods fail to fully capture this pathway. Current approaches typically model only isolated segments of the…
One of the key challenges to predict odor from molecular structure is unarguably our limited understanding of the odor space and the complexity of the underlying structure-odor relationships. Here, we show that the predictive performance of…
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…
Given the structure of a novel molecule, there is still no one who can reliably predict what odor percept that molecule will evoke. The challenge comes from both the difficulty in quantitatively characterizing molecular structure, and the…