Reviews: A Similarity-preserving Network Trained on Transformed Images Recapitulates Salient Features of the Fly Motion Detection Circuit

This paper examines neural circuits for motion detection, which have been extensively modeled and are certainly of interest to the field. A nice connection is drawn with recent work on biologically plausible learning of similarity matching objective functions, which is also of great interest to the field. While the work draws a nice connection on timely topics, some of the conclusions and biological predictions were difficult for me to follow. While the paper is decently written, the presentation is dense and difficult to follow in several places. This is partly due to space constraints on the manuscript, but I nonetheless think there is room for improvement in sections 2.1, section 3, and section 4. Section 2.1 and the preceding paragraph would be easily understood by readers with a background in group theory (I imagine this would be mostly limited to physicists), but I don't think this level of sophistication is necessary to convey the main ideas of the paper.