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 Bayesian Inference


Spatio-temporal Representations of Uncertainty in Spiking Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

It has been long argued that, because of inherent ambiguity and noise, the brain needs to represent uncertainty in the form of probability distributions. The neural encoding of such distributions remains however highly controversial. Here we present a novel circuit model for representing multidimensional real-valued distributions using a spike based spatio-temporal code. Our model combines the computational advantages of the currently competing models for probabilistic codes and exhibits realistic neural responses along a variety of classic measures. Furthermore, the model highlights the challenges associated with interpreting neural activity in relation to behavioral uncertainty and points to alternative population-level approaches for the experimental validation of distributed representations. Core brain computations, such as sensory perception, have been successfully characterized as probabilistic inference, whereby sensory stimuli are interpreted in terms of the objects or features that gave rise to them [1, 2].





Generalized Bayesian Inference for Scientific Simulators via Amortized Cost Estimation Richard Gao

Neural Information Processing Systems

Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference for simulators with implicit likelihoods. But when we are primarily interested in the quality of predictive simulations, or when the model cannot exactly reproduce the observed data (i.e., is misspecified), targeting the Bayesian posterior may be