Concurrent measurements of neural activity at multiple scales, sometimes performed with multimodal techniques, become increasingly important for studying brain function. However, statistical methods for their concurrent analysis are currently lacking. Here we introduce such techniques in a framework based on vine copulas with mixed margins to construct multivariate stochastic models. These models can describe detailed mixed interactions between discrete variables such as neural spike counts, and continuous variables such as local field potentials. We propose efficient methods for likelihood calculation, inference, sampling and mutual information estimation within this framework. We test our methods on simulated data and demonstrate applicability on mixed data generated by a biologically realistic neural network. Our methods hold the promise to considerably improve statistical analysis of neural data recorded simultaneously at different scales.

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Previous studies have proposed image-based clutter measures that correlate with human search times and/or eye movements. However, most models do not take into account the fact that the effects of clutter interact with the foveated nature of the human visual system: visual clutter further from the fovea has an increasing detrimental influence on perception. Here, we introduce a new foveated clutter model to predict the detrimental effects in target search utilizing a forced fixation search task. We use Feature Congestion (Rosenholtz et al.) as our non foveated clutter model, and we stack a peripheral architecture on top of Feature Congestion for our foveated model. We introduce the Peripheral Integration Feature Congestion (PIFC) coefficient, as a fundamental ingredient of our model that modulates clutter as a non-linear gain contingent on eccentricity. We show that Foveated Feature Congestion (FFC) clutter scores (r(44) = 0.82 0.04,p < 0.0001) correlate better with target detection (hit rate) than regular Feature Congestion (r(44) = 0.19 0.13,p= 0.0774) in forced fixation search; and we extend foveation to other clutter models showing stronger correlations in all cases. Thus, our model allows us to enrich clutter perception research by computing fixation specific clutter maps. Code for building peripheral representations is available1.

The goal of noisy high-dimensional phase retrieval is to estimate an s-sparse parameter β Rd from n realizations of the model Y = (X>β)2 + ε. Based on this model, we propose a significant semi-parametric generalization called misspecified phase retrieval (MPR), in which Y = f(X>β,ε) with unknown f and Cov(Y,(X>β)2) > 0. For example, MPR encompasses Y = h(|X>β |) + ε with increasing h as a special case.

Constraint-based causal discovery from limited data is a notoriously difficult challenge due to the many borderline independence test decisions. Several approaches to improve the reliability of the predictions by exploiting redundancy in the independence information have been proposed recently. Though promising, existing approaches can still be greatly improved in terms of accuracy and scalability. We present a novel method that reduces the combinatorial explosion of the search space by using a more coarse-grained representation of causal information, drastically reducing computation time. Additionally, we propose a method to score causal predictions based on their confidence. Crucially, our implementation also allows one to easily combine observational and interventional data and to incorporate various types of available background knowledge. We prove soundness and asymptotic consistency of our method and demonstrate that it can outperform the state-ofthe-art on synthetic data, achieving a speedup of several orders of magnitude. We illustrate its practical feasibility by applying it to a challenging protein data set.

Better understanding of the potential benefits of information transfer and representation learning is an important step towards the goal of building intelligent systems that are able to persist in the world and learn over time. In this work, we consider a setting where the learner encounters a stream of tasks but is able to retain only limited information from each encountered task, such as a learned predictor. In contrast to most previous works analyzing this scenario, we do not make any distributional assumptions on the task generating process. Instead, we formulate a complexity measure that captures the diversity of the observed tasks. We provide a lifelong learning algorithm with error guarantees for every observed task (rather than on average). We show sample complexity reductions in comparison to solving every task in isolation in terms of our task complexity measure. Further, our algorithmic framework can naturally be viewed as learning a representation from encountered tasks with a neural network.

We propose a novel approach to reduce the computational cost of evaluation of convolutional neural networks, a factor that has hindered their deployment in lowpower devices such as mobile phones. Inspired by the loop perforation technique from source code optimization, we speed up the bottleneck convolutional layers by skipping their evaluation in some of the spatial positions. We propose and analyze several strategies of choosing these positions. We demonstrate that perforation can accelerate modern convolutional networks such as AlexNet and VGG-16 by a factor of 2 - 4 . Additionally, we show that perforation is complementary to the recently proposed acceleration method of Zhang et al. [28].

This paper proposes an adaptive neural-compilation framework to address the problem of learning efficient programs. Traditional code optimisation strategies used in compilers are based on applying pre-specified set of transformations that make the code faster to execute without changing its semantics. In contrast, our work involves adapting programs to make them more efficient while considering correctness only on a target input distribution. Our approach is inspired by the recent works on differentiable representations of programs. We show that it is possible to compile programs written in a low-level language to a differentiable representation. We also show how programs in this representation can be optimised to make them efficient on a target input distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enables learning specifically-tuned algorithms for given data distributions with a high success rate.