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Systems of interacting continuous-time Markov chains are a powerful model class, but inference is typically intractable in high dimensional settings. Auxiliary information, such as noisy observations, is typically only available at discrete…
Patterns of microcircuitry suggest that the brain has an array of repeated canonical computational units. Yet neural representations are distributed, so the relevant computations may only be related indirectly to single-neuron…
Model Predictive Controllers (MPC) require a good model for the controlled process. In this paper I infer inductive biases about a physical system. I use these biases to derive a new neural network architecture that can model this real…
Recordings from neurons in the insects' olfactory primary processing center, the antennal lobe (AL), reveal that the AL is able to process the input from chemical receptors into distinct neural activity patterns, called olfactory neural…
The Apperception Engine is an unsupervised learning system. Given a sequence of sensory inputs, it constructs a symbolic causal theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions. The unity…
Current deep learning approaches have shown good in-distribution generalization performance, but struggle with out-of-distribution generalization. This is especially true in the case of tasks involving abstract relations like recognizing…
In psychology and neuroscience it is common to describe cognitive systems as input/output devices where perceptual and motor functions are implemented in a purely feedforward, open-loop fashion. On this view, perception and action are often…
Cognitive studies and artificial intelligence have developed distinct models for various inferential mechanisms (categorization, induction, abduction, causal inference, contrast, merge, ...). Yet, both natural and artificial views on…
Active inference is an ambitious theory that treats perception, inference and action selection of autonomous agents under the heading of a single principle. It suggests biologically plausible explanations for many cognitive phenomena,…
Determining how synaptic coupling within and between regions is modulated during sensory processing is an important topic in neuroscience. Electrophysiological recordings provide detailed information about neural spiking but have…
Generalized linear models are one of the most efficient paradigms for predicting the correlated stochastic activity of neuronal networks in response to external stimuli, with applications in many brain areas. However, when dealing with…
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…
When the brain receives input from multiple sensory systems, it is faced with the question of whether it is appropriate to process the inputs in combination, as if they originated from the same event, or separately, as if they originated…
Causal inference methods based on conditional independence construct Markov equivalent graphs, and cannot be applied to bivariate cases. The approaches based on independence of cause and mechanism state, on the contrary, that causal…
Infants often exhibit goal-directed behaviors, such as reaching for a sensory stimulus, even when no external reward criterion is provided. These intrinsically motivated behaviors facilitate spontaneous exploration and learning of the body…
Correlations in sensory neural networks have both extrinsic and intrinsic origins. Extrinsic or stimulus correlations arise from shared inputs to the network, and thus depend strongly on the stimulus ensemble. Intrinsic or noise…
Active Inference is a closed-loop computational theoretical basis for understanding behaviour, based on agents with internal probabilistic generative models that encode their beliefs about how hidden states in their environment cause their…
We consider causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. We study the case where a proxy is available for the unobserved confounding in the form of a network connecting the units. For example, the link structure of a social…
This paper addresses two main challenges facing systems neuroscience today: understanding the nature and function of a) cortical feedback between sensory areas and b) correlated variability. Starting from the old idea of perception as…
With recent and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the foundation of purposeful behaviour in autonomous agents is crucial for developing safe and efficient systems. While artificial neural networks have…