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Decades of research on the neural code underlying spatial navigation have revealed a diverse set of neural response properties. The Entorhinal Cortex (EC) of the mammalian brain contains a rich set of spatial correlates, including grid…
In this paper, we introduce the Semantic Environment Atlas (SEA), a novel mapping approach designed to enhance visual navigation capabilities of embodied agents. The SEA utilizes semantic graph maps that intricately delineate the…
A variety of behaviors like spatial navigation or bodily motion can be formulated as graph traversal problems through cognitive maps. We present a neural network model which can solve such tasks and is compatible with a broad range of…
An important open question in computational neuroscience is how various spatially tuned neurons, such as place cells, are used to support the learning of reward-seeking behavior of an animal. Existing computational models either lack…
We present a new method to localize a camera within a previously unseen environment perceived from an egocentric point of view. Although this is, in general, an ill-posed problem, humans can effortlessly and efficiently determine their…
The entorhinal-hippocampal circuit plays a critical role in higher brain functions, especially spatial cognition. Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) periodically fire with different grid spacing and orientation, which makes a…
How does the mind organize thoughts? The hippocampal-entorhinal complex is thought to support domain-general representation and processing of structural knowledge of arbitrary state, feature and concept spaces. In particular, it enables the…
Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, together with head direction, place, speed and border cells, are major contributors to the organization of spatial representations in the brain. In this work we introduce a novel theoretical and…
In this paper, we present a method of embedding physics data manifolds with metric structure into lower dimensional spaces with simpler metrics, such as Euclidean and Hyperbolic spaces. We then demonstrate that it can be a powerful step in…
Fourier-like summation of several grid cell modules with different spatial frequencies in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) has long been proposed to form the contours of place firing fields. Recent experiments largely, but not completely,…
Memory systems can store vastly different amounts of information despite similar hardware constraints. Here, we show that superior spatial memory emerges from a discrete stiffening of hippocampal population geometry-a transition from…
The spiking activity of the hippocampal place cells plays a key role in producing and sustaining an internalized representation of the ambient space---a cognitive map. These cells do not only exhibit location-specific spiking during…
The mammalian hippocampus plays a principal role in producing a cognitive map of space---an internalized representation of the animal's environment. The neuronal mechanisms producing this map depend primarily on the temporal structure of…
The grid cells discovered in the rodent medial entorhinal cortex have been proposed to provide a metric for Euclidean space, possibly even hardwired in the embryo. Yet one class of models describing the formation of grid unit selectivity is…
Representing graphs as sets of node embeddings in certain curved Riemannian manifolds has recently gained momentum in machine learning due to their desirable geometric inductive biases, e.g., hierarchical structures benefit from hyperbolic…
The aim of this work is to use Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn a representation of an indoor environment that can be used for robot navigation. We use images extracted from a video, in which a camera takes a tour around a house, for…
Neural embeddings have been used with great success in Natural Language Processing (NLP). They provide compact representations that encapsulate word similarity and attain state-of-the-art performance in a range of linguistic tasks. The…
Animals must constantly make decisions on the move, such as when choosing among multiple options, or "targets", in space. Recent evidence suggests that this results from a recursive feedback between the (vectorial) neural representation of…
Boundary Vector Cells (BVCs) are a class of neurons in the brains of vertebrates that encode environmental boundaries at specific distances and allocentric directions, playing a central role in forming place fields in the hippocampus. Most…
High-dimensional neural activity often reside in a low-dimensional subspace, referred to as neural manifolds. Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex provide a periodic spatial code that are organized near a toroidal manifold,…