Topic: random features

Brains must represent the outside world in a way that allows animals to survive and thrive. In early sensory systems, the way neurons respond to stimuli can be summarized in their receptive fields (RFs), and these are structured to detect certain features. Experimental data show that they are also noisy, but this randomness remains unaccounted for in existing models. By taking this unexplained variability into account, we reveal how the interplay between structure and random noise provides important computational benefits for sensory encoding. Furthermore, structured randomness offers a biolog