A fully funded PhD position is available with Dr Georgios Exarchakis and Prof Michael Tipping at the University of Bath. The project is about Interpretable Models for Invariant Representations of High-dimensional Data.

Sensory systems reliably process incoming stimuli in spite of changes in context. Most recent models accredit this context invariance to an extraction of increasingly complex sensory features in hierarchical feedforward networks. Here, we study how context-invariant representations can be established by feedback rather than feedforward processing. We show that feedforward neural networks modulated by feedback can dynamically generate invariant sensory representations. The required feedback can be implemented as a slow and spatially diffuse gain modulation. The invariance is not present on the level of individual neurons, but emerges only on the population level. Mechanistically, the feedback modulation dynamically reorients the manifold of neural activity and thereby maintains an invariant neural subspace in spite of contextual variations. Our results highlight the importance of population-level analyses for understanding the role of feedback in flexible sensory processing.

The intensity and features of sensory stimuli are encoded in the activity of neurons in the cortex. In the visual and piriform cortices, the stimulus intensity re-scales the activity of the population without changing its selectivity for the stimulus features. The cortical representation of the stimulus is therefore intensity-invariant. This emergence of network invariant representations appears robust to local changes in synaptic strength induced by synaptic plasticity, even though: i) synaptic plasticity can potentiate or depress connections between neurons in a feature-dependent manner, and ii) in networks with balanced excitation and inhibition, synaptic plasticity determines the non-linear network behavior. In this study, we investigate the consistency of invariant representations with a variety of synaptic states in balanced networks. By using mean-field models and spiking network simulations, we show how the synaptic state controls the emergence of intensity-invariant or intensity-dependent selectivity by inducing changes in the network response to intensity. In particular, we demonstrate how facilitating synaptic states can sharpen the network selectivity while depressing states broaden it. We also show how power-law-type synapses permit the emergence of invariant network selectivity and how this plasticity can be generated by a mix of different plasticity rules. Our results explain how the physiology of individual synapses is linked to the emergence of invariant representations of sensory stimuli at the network level.