Topic: Oja's rule

Insects demonstrate a remarkable ability to navigate the world -- foraging for food and returning to their nests over large distances. Simple neural circuits have been shown to underlie insect navigation behaviours, encoding the animal's head direction and velocity vector as a sinusoidal activity pattern\cite{heinze2007maplike,lyuBuildingAllocentricTravelling2022}. We offer novel mathematical insights into the benefits of this sinusoidal encoding, suggesting that it might offer an evolutionary advantage in terms of noise resilience. Previous work has recognised that encoding vectors as sinusoi

Understanding synaptic plasticity is critical for elucidating mechanisms for neural development, learning and memory consolidation. Synaptic plasticity is modelled by simulating the activity of interacting neural populations, using hypothesized functions (plasticity rules) that modify the connections between neurons. Plasticity rules are typically hand-crafted from single-synapse experiment data, but have shown limited success in understanding network-level properties. Recent studies aim to discover rules using supervised learning rather than hand-crafting them. However, these approaches stil

Intrinsic dynamics within the brain can accelerate learning by providing a prior scaffolding for dynamics aligned with task objectives. Such intrinsic dynamics should self-organize and self-sustain in the face of fluctuating inputs and biological noise, including synaptic turnover and cell death. An example of such dynamics is the formation of sequences, a ubiquitous motif in neural activity. The sequence-generating circuit in zebra finch HVC provides a reliable timing scaffold for motor output in song and demonstrates a remarkable capacity for unsupervised recovery following perturbation. Ins