Latent representations

Juvenile male zebra finches learn to produce a single, highly stereotyped song and maintain this song over the course of their adult lives using auditory feedback. Much of what we know of the underlying learning process comes from studies of adult male zebra finches adapting to white noise feedback triggered by either high or low-pitch variants of harmonic stack syllables --- a single static perturbation of a single, simple syllable of a crystallized song. However, zebra finch song is spectrally and temporally rich, with numerous degrees of freedom, and the dynamic learning process must tackle

Sparse coding is an effective computational strategy for ensuring robust pattern storage and memory recall of correlated patterns. In the hippocampus, many neurons fire in localised receptive fields that tile an animal's physical environment, forming a sparse spatial population code. But the underlying computations and their functional purpose remain unclear. Various ANNs have been proposed to learn localised, manifold-tiling codes, purportedly due to explicit constraints on network activity levels or to specific task objectives, such as predicting future observations. Here, we show that in si

…examples connect predictive learning, latent representations and rich versus lazy learning regimes. The conversation also examines how theoretical neuroscientists choose useful abstractions and which assumptions about network structure and funct

Undirected behavior reflects cognitive functions and provides insights for diagnosing psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder (BD) (McReynolds, 1962). Open-field animal behaviors have been well-studied for this purpose; however, a corresponding human subject paradigm is still lacking, and quantifying complex spontaneous human behaviors is challenging. Here, we demonstrate a semi-supervised model to quantify undirected human behavior, differentiate subtle hallmark behavioral features of BD, and create a natural language generative model to provide nuanced interpretations of behaviors wi

The understanding of the stroke lesions’ consequences is limited, and it relies mostly on behavioral reports and mere descriptive correlational information from neuroimaging techniques. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, it has been shown that the functional synchronization between distinct regions of the brain, referred to as functional connectivity, is disrupted by stroke. Nevertheless, this kind of data is usually large and high-dimensional. Extracting useful information from the vast amount of information afforded by brain networks remains a great challenge so, in order to make s

…explanation of how working memory (WM) representations are built from the latent representations of visual knowledge and can then be reconstructed. The proposed model, Memory for Latent Representations (MLR), features a variational autoencoder with an architecture that corresponds broadly to the human visual system and an activation-based binding pool of neurons that binds items’ attributes to tokenized representations. The simulation r