Deep learning models are evaluated for sensory information processing.
problem Unclear interpretation of model comparison techniques for DNNs.
method Explicitly define conclusions from existing model comparison techniques.
result Stronger conclusions about sensory processing mechanisms possible with DNNs.
New method decomposes sensory information from neurons into specific stimuli and features.
problem Understanding how much and what specific information neurons encode.
method Introduced axioms for meaningful stimulus-wise decomposition and derived a tractable solution using diffusion models.
result Can efficiently estimate contributions of specific stimuli and features to encoded information.
PeL separates sensory interface optimization from decision learning.
problem Optimizing sensory interfaces without task-specific information.
method Formal separation of perception and decision learning, using metrics for stability, informativeness, and geometry.
result Updates preserving invariants are orthogonal to decision gradients.
Graph Convolutional Networks improve prosthetic sensation interpretation.
problem Improving neuroprosthetic performance and sensory information stability.
method Applied Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to interpret neuronal spiking activity.
result GCN model achieved 73.5% performance on ordinal regression task.
Tensor models decode human perception and memory using SPO triples.
problem Understanding implicit and explicit perception and memory in the brain.
method Tensor models with SPO triples, dual representations, and four layers.
result Semantic memory is crucial for explicit perception and declarative memories.
RNNs are suboptimal at compressing past sensory inputs for future prediction.
problem RNNs do not optimally compress past sensory inputs for future prediction.
method Investigated RNNs trained with maximum likelihood and found they extract unnecessary information. Injected noise into hidden states to improve performance.
result Injecting noise into RNN hidden states improves predictive information, sample quality, likelihood, and classification performance.
Algorithm balances learning and coverage for multi-robots over unknown fields.
problem Balancing learning and coverage for multi-robots over unknown, nonuniform sensory fields.
method DSLC algorithm that schedules learning and coverage epochs, using Gaussian Process modeling and coverage regret analysis.
result Upper bound on expected cumulative coverage regret provided for DSLC.
Grasping is a complex process involving knowledge of the object, the surroundings, and of oneself. While humans are able to integrate and process all of the sensory information required for performing this task, equipping machines with this capability is an extremely challenging endeavor. In this paper, we investigate …
Animals execute goal-directed behaviours despite the limited range and scope of their sensors. To cope, they explore environments and store memories maintaining estimates of important information that is not presently available. Recently, progress has been made with artificial intelligence (AI) agents that learn to per…
The process of dynamic state estimation (filtering) based on point process observations is in general intractable. Numerical sampling techniques are often practically useful, but lead to limited conceptual insight about optimal encoding/decoding strategies, which are of significant relevance to Computational Neuroscien…
Study how actions affect perception in embodied agents using group theory.
problem Understanding how actions influence perception in autonomous agents.
method Mathematical formalism of group theory applied to sensory commutativity of action sequences.
result Introduced Sensory Commutativity Probability (SCP) to measure action effects on perception.
This thesis optimizes neuromorphic systems by slowing down their dynamics, improving performance.
problem Timescale mismatch between analog neuromorphic circuits and real-time sensory inputs.
method Proposes and tests solutions to slow down the dynamics of spiking neural networks.
result Spiking neural networks on analog neuromorphic systems can achieve significant performance boosts.
Large language models predict human sensory judgments across multiple modalities.
problem Determining the extent of perceptual information in language.
method State-of-the-art large language models were used to predict sensory judgments across six psychophysical datasets.
result Large language models can predict human sensory judgments across multiple modalities with significant correlation to human data.
This research improves multimodal systems by adding a second objective and regularisation methods.
problem Improving performance of multimodal systems with multiple objectives and regularisation.
method Introduces a second objective over multimodal fusion using variational inference and regularisation methods.
result Demonstrates potential for multiple objectives and probabilistic methods to lower variance and improve generalisation.
We discuss memory models which are based on tensor decompositions using latent representations of entities and events. We show how episodic memory and semantic memory can be realized and discuss how new memory traces can be generated from sensory input: Existing memories are the basis for perception and new memories ar…
An increasing number of sensors on mobile, Internet of things (IoT), and wearable devices generate time-series measurements of physical activities. Though access to the sensory data is critical to the success of many beneficial applications such as health monitoring or activity recognition, a wide range of potentially …
This research converts visual information into audio for users to perceive.
problem Brevity in conveying visual information through spoken language.
method Pretrained image embedding network, GAN for metric space mapping, human subject testing.
result Users can accurately classify audio sonifications of faces.
Agents acting in the natural world aim at selecting appropriate actions based on noisy and partial sensory observations. Many behaviors leading to decision mak- ing and action selection in a closed loop setting are naturally phrased within a control theoretic framework. Within the framework of optimal Control Theory, o…
Robot learns tool use from effects, detecting features of tools, objects, and actions.
problem Teaching robots to understand and manipulate objects using tools.
method Deep learning model trained on sensory-motor data from a robot performing a tool-use task.
result Robot can detect features of tools, objects, and actions from effects of object manipulation.
New method extracts factors of variation from data without much supervision.
problem Disentangling complex sensory inputs into simple factors of variation without much supervision.
method Develops a new approach for disentanglement under structural assumptions, reducing the need for auxiliary information.
result Disentanglement is possible even when auxiliary information does not ensure conditional independence, with less auxiliary information required.
We consider a scenario where the aim of a group of agents is to perform the optimal coverage of a region according to a sensory function. In particular, centroidal Voronoi partitions have to be computed. The difficulty of the task is that the sensory function is unknown and has to be reconstructed on line from noisy me…
A novel circuit motif uses sister cells for inference with correlated priors.
problem Structured priors in neural systems pose architectural challenges.
method Proposes a novel circuit motif using sister cells to implement correlated priors without direct interactions.
result Demonstrates the efficacy of correlated priors for inference in noisy environments.
Guided spectral embedding highlights C. elegans neural network.
problem Understanding the C. elegans neural network structure and function.
method A new guided spectral embedding method that maximizes energy concentration and minimizes modified embedded distance, using a given importance weighting of nodes.
result The guided approach provides more biological insights, distinguishing somatic positions and processing functions of cells.
Inspired by brain's modality fusion, this paper detects active speakers from audio and video.
problem Detecting active speakers in noisy environments.
method Inspired by brain's superior colliculus, combines audio and visual data through specialized neural networks and a novel fusion layer.
result Achieved results greatly surpassing initial expectations, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Method infers internal model from rational foraging behavior.
problem Discover how the brain represents and computes dynamic beliefs.
method POMDP model, EM algorithm, maximum likelihood estimation.
result Successfully recovered internal model and reward function of foraging agents.
STRODE learns timings and dynamics from unlabeled time series data.
problem Learning dynamics of random event timings from unlabeled sensory inputs.
method Probabilistic Ordinary Differential Equation (STRODE) that samples from posterior point processes.
result Successfully infers event timings from synthetic and real-world datasets.
With the rising number of interconnected devices and sensors, modeling distributed sensor networks is of increasing interest. Recurrent neural networks (RNN) are considered particularly well suited for modeling sensory and streaming data. When predicting future behavior, incorporating information from neighboring senso…
No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error gives it the maximum reward, but where the true reward is actually small. We formal…
A central challenge in neuroscience is to understand neural computations and circuit mechanisms that underlie the encoding of ethologically relevant, natural stimuli. In multilayered neural circuits, nonlinear processes such as synaptic transmission and spiking dynamics present a significant obstacle to the creation of…
A deep learning framework assesses physical rehabilitation exercises.
problem Lack of versatile, robust, and practical assessment methods for rehabilitation exercises.
method Deep learning framework with metrics, scoring functions, and neural networks.
result First implementation of deep neural networks for rehabilitation performance assessment.
New method identifies flawed internal models of the world in animals.
problem How animals make decisions with partial sensory information.
method Generalizes Inverse Rational Control to continuous nonlinear dynamics and noise.
result Identifies the best internal model explaining an agent's actions.
Objects are represented in sensory systems by continuous manifolds due to sensitivity of neuronal responses to changes in physical features such as location, orientation, and intensity. What makes certain sensory representations better suited for invariant decoding of objects by downstream networks? We present a theory…
Physics-informed denoising improves sensor data accuracy without needing clean data.
problem Noise in real-life sensor data affects system performance and reliability.
method Physics-informed denoising model that uses algebraic relationships between sensor measurements governed by physical laws.
result Achieved state-of-the-art performance in various real-world applications.
The process of dynamic state estimation (filtering) based on point process observations is in general intractable. Numerical sampling techniques are often practically useful, but lead to limited conceptual insight about optimal encoding/decoding strategies, which are of significant relevance to Computational Neuroscien…
Learning by children and animals occurs effortlessly and largely without obvious supervision. Successes in automating supervised learning have not translated to the more ambiguous realm of unsupervised learning where goals and labels are not provided. Barlow (1961) suggested that the signal that brains leverage for uns…
Spectral method speeds fitting of binary time series models.
problem Modeling binary time series data with latent linear dynamical systems.
method Spectral learning of probit-Bernoulli latent linear dynamical systems.
result Spectral method provides robust, fixed-cost estimator.
A model learns successor representations in uncertain environments.
problem Learning effective strategies in partially observable, noisy environments.
method Neurally plausible model using distributional successor features.
result Distributional successor features support reinforcement learning in noisy environments.
PVAE learns disentangled representations from multimodal data.
problem Learning disentangled representations from multimodal sensory data.
method Partitioned Variational Autoencoder (PVAE) with multimodal generative model and training objectives.
result PVAE achieves over 99% accuracy on both modalities for semantic units.
Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) can be significantly improved with effective driver action prediction (DAP). Predicting driver actions early and accurately can help mitigate the effects of potentially unsafe driving behaviors and avoid possible accidents. In this paper, we formulate driver action prediction a…
Framework transfers inertial motion across domains without labeled data.
problem Inertial measurements are sensitive to sensor placement and motion dynamics.
method Extracts domain-invariant features and transfers them to new domains.
result Framework converts raw IMU sequences into accurate inertial trajectories.
A major contributing factor to the recent advances in deep neural networks is structural units that let sensory information and gradients to propagate easily. Gating is one such structure that acts as a flow control. Gates are employed in many recent state-of-the-art recurrent models such as LSTM and GRU, and feedforwa…
The article explores how organisms and machines learn and recognize the world using Bayesian inference and thermodynamics.
problem Understanding how organisms and machines learn and recognize the world.
method Introducing a thermodynamic view of the Bayesian brain hypothesis, using a simple generative model of spiking neural populations.
result The process of Bayesian inference can be quantified using entropy, revealing the perceptual capacity of neural activity.
The paper develops models to understand sensory coding and cortical topography.
problem Understanding how visual cortical areas' receptive fields and topographic maps relate to environmental statistical structure.
method Energy-based models applied to probability density estimation, constrained by biological constraints.
result The models qualitatively reproduce receptive field and map properties found in vivo.
ForGAN uses GANs for probabilistic forecasting of sensory data.
problem Challenges in traditional forecasting methods and difficulties in probabilistic methods.
method ForGAN combines GANs with conditional generative adversarial networks to learn data distributions and generate probabilistic forecasts.
result ForGAN outperforms traditional regression methods in probabilistic forecasting of sensory data.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown incredible performance in learning various tasks to the human level. However, unlike human perception, current DRL models connect the entire low-level sensory input to the state-action values rather than exploiting the relationship between and among entities that constitute t…
Understanding how different information sources together transmit information is crucial in many domains. For example, understanding the neural code requires characterizing how different neurons contribute unique, redundant, or synergistic pieces of information about sensory or behavioral variables. Williams and Beer (…
Deep active inference learns policies from sensory inputs.
problem Learning policies in partially observable domains.
method Optimizes expected free energy with a variational autoencoder.
result Comparable or better performance than deep Q-learning.
Continual state learning model using generative replay for RL.
problem Efficiently learn and adapt state representations as the environment changes.
method Variational Auto-Encoders for state representation and Generative Replay for past knowledge.
result Automatic environment change detection and efficient state representation.