9 accepted papers
The Bayesian brain hypothesis has been a leading theory in understanding perceptual decision-making under uncertainty. While extensive psychophysical evidence supports the notion of the brain performing Bayesian computations, how uncertainty information is encoded in sensory neural populations remai…
Learning a compact representation of history is critical for planning and generalization in partially observable environments. While meta-reinforcement learning (RL) agents can attain near Bayes-optimal policies, they often fail to learn the compact, interpretable Bayes-optimal belief states. This…
In recent years, deep learning models have set new standards in predicting neural population responses. Most of these models currently focus on predicting the mean response of each neuron for a given input. However, neural variability around this mean is not just noise and plays a central role in se…
Prevailing theories of perception hypothesize that the brain implements perception via Bayesian inference in a generative model of the world. One prominent theory, the Neural Sampling Code (NSC), posits that neuronal responses to a stimulus represent samples from the posterior distribution over late…
Transferring knowledge embedded in trained neural networks is a core problem in areas like model compression and continual learning. Among knowledge transfer approaches, functional transfer methods such as knowledge distillation and representational distance learning are particularly promising, sinc…
We present a joint deep neural system identification model for two major sources of neural variability: stimulus-driven and stimulus-conditioned fluctuations. To this end, we combine (1) state-of-the-art deep networks for stimulus-driven activity and (2) a flexible, normalizing flow-based generative…
Deep neural networks (DNN) have set new standards at predicting responses of neural populations to visual input. Most such DNNs consist of a convolutional network (core) shared across all neurons which learns a representation of neural computation in visual cortex and a neuron-specific readout that…
Similar to a convolutional neural network (CNN), the mammalian retina encodes visual information into several dozen nonlinear feature maps, each formed by one ganglion cell type that tiles the visual space in an approximately shift-equivariant manner. Whether such organization into distinct cell typ…
Classical models describe primary visual cortex (V1) as a filter bank of orientation-selective linear-nonlinear (LN) or energy models, but these models fail to predict neural responses to natural stimuli accurately. Recent work shows that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be trained to predic…