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Sensory systems across all modalities and species exhibit adaptation to continuously changing input statistics. Individual neurons have been shown to modulate their response gains so as to maximize information transmission in different…
The advent of neural audio codecs has increased in popularity due to their potential for efficiently modeling audio with transformers. Such advanced codecs represent audio from a highly continuous waveform to low-sampled discrete units. In…
Living cells sense their environment through the binding of extra-cellular molecular ligands to cell surface receptors. Puzzlingly, vast numbers of signaling pathways exhibit a high degree of cross talk between different signals whereby…
A living cell senses its environment and responds to external signals. In this work, we study theoretically, the precision at which cells can determine the position of a spatially localized transient extracellular signal. To this end, we…
Several studies with brain signals suggested that bottom-up and top-down influences are exerted through distinct frequency bands among visual cortical areas. It has been recently shown that theta and gamma rhythms subserve feedforward,…
The standard quantum state discrimination problem can be understood as a communication scenario involving a sender and a receiver following these three steps: (i) the sender encodes information in pre-agreed quantum states, (ii) sends them…
The subcortical sensory pathways are the fundamental channels for mapping the outside world to our minds. Sensory pathways efficiently transmit information by adapting neural responses to the local statistics of the sensory input. The…
Single-cell studies often show significant phenotypic variability due to the stochastic nature of intra-cellular biochemical reactions. When the numbers of molecules, e.g., transcription factors and regulatory enzymes, are in low abundance,…
Biochemistry, ecology, and neuroscience are examples of prominent fields aiming at describing interacting systems that exhibit non-trivial couplings to complex, ever-changing environments. We have recently shown that linear interactions and…
We show that a rate of conditional Shannon entropy reduction, characterizing the learning of an internal process about an external process, is bounded by the thermodynamic entropy production. This approach allows for the definition of an…
Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…
Spatial heterogeneity is a hallmark of living systems, even at the molecular scale in individual cells. A key example is the partitioning of membrane-bound proteins via lipid domain formation or cytoskeleton-induced corralling. Yet the…
Gene expression is stochastic and displays variation ("noise") both within and between cells. Intracellular (intrinsic) variance can be distinguished from extracellular (extrinsic) variance by applying the law of total variance to data from…
Speech emotion recognition (SER) systems often struggle in real-world environments, where ambient noise severely degrades their performance. This paper explores a novel approach that exploits prior knowledge of testing environments to…
Extracellular recordings of single neurons in primary and secondary somatosensory cortices of monkeys in vivo have shown that their firing rate can increase, decrease, or remain constant in different cells, as the external stimulus…
Recurrently connected neuron populations play key roles in sensory perception and memory storage across various brain regions. While these populations are often assumed to encode information through firing rates, this method becomes…
Neurons encode information about the environment through their activity. As animals explore the environment, neurons rapidly acquire selectivity for distinct features of the external world; characterizing how these selectivity patterns…
The concept of feature selectivity in sensory signal processing can be formalized as dimensionality reduction: in a stimulus space of very high dimensions, neurons respond only to variations within some smaller, relevant subspace. But if…
Cells adapt to different conditions by altering a vast number of components, which is measurable using transcriptome analysis. Given that a cell undergoing steady growth is constrained to sustain each of its internal components, the…
It often is emphasized that gene expression is noisy. A seemingly contradictory view is that control mechanisms have been optimized to squeeze as much information as possible out of a limited number of molecules. Here we revisit these…