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Stefan Mihalas

6 accepted papers

2025

Slow Transition to Low-Dimensional Chaos in Heavy-Tailed Recurrent Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2025poster

Growing evidence suggests that synaptic weights in the brain follow heavy-tailed distributions, yet most theoretical analyses of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) assume Gaussian connectivity. We systematically study the activity of RNNs with random weights drawn from biologically plausible Lévy alph…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

How connectivity structure shapes rich and lazy learning in neural circuits

ICLR 2024poster

In theoretical neuroscience, recent work leverages deep learning tools to explore how some network attributes critically influence its learning dynamics. Notably, initial weight distributions with small (resp. large) variance may yield a rich (resp. lazy) regime, where significant (resp. minor) chan…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

Efficient approximation of neural population structure and correlations with probabilistic circuits

ICLR 2023poster

We present a computationally efficient framework to model a wide range of population structures with high order correlations and a large number of neurons. Our method is based on a special type of Bayesian network that has linear inference time and is founded upon the concept of contextual independe…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Gaussian Partial Information Decomposition: Bias Correction and Application to High-dimensional Data

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Recent advances in neuroscientific experimental techniques have enabled us to simultaneously record the activity of thousands of neurons across multiple brain regions. This has led to a growing need for computational tools capable of analyzing how task-relevant information is represented and communi…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Biologically-plausible backpropagation through arbitrary timespans via local neuromodulators

NeurIPS 2022accept

The spectacular successes of recurrent neural network models where key parameters are adjusted via backpropagation-based gradient descent have inspired much thought as to how biological neuronal networks might solve the corresponding synaptic credit assignment problem [1, 2, 3]. There is so far litt…

2016

High resolution neural connectivity from incomplete tracing data using nonnegative spline regression

NeurIPS 2016poster

Whole-brain neural connectivity data are now available from viral tracing experiments, which reveal the connections between a source injection site and elsewhere in the brain. These hold the promise of revealing spatial patterns of connectivity throughout the mammalian brain. To achieve this goal, w…