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While our study identifies clear separations between model hypothesis classes, our best models still have not reached the consistency ceiling of the neural and behavioral benchmarks we have compared against. The latent future prediction dynamics modules of all the foundation models were pretrained on Physion just as the end-to-end models were, and those Physion trained dynamics modules were evaluated against neural and behavioral data, ultimately outperforming the end-to-end Physion dynamics. Despite our interest, pretraining the end-to-end models on datasets larger than Physion exceeds our current computational resources, as evidenced by models like FitVid requiring nearly a month of training on eight A100 GPUs with Physion alone. Therefore, the vision foundation models ultimately have to deal with the harder problem of generalizing to Physion compared to end-to-end models. While we believe our dynamically-equipped foundation model paradigm to be a generally promising way forward towards models with strong internal simulations, we identify in the Discussion ( 7), several ways that their encoder and dynamics modules can be improved, which we plan to explore in future work.

Here we compute the mean and standard deviation across seeds. Model Robustness score Baseline 100% MTL with real responses 109% MTL with predicted responses (MTL-Monkey) 118% MTL with shuffled predicted responses (MTL-Shuffled) 98% Table 3: Comparing our MTL model co-trained on predicted neural responses -MTL-Monkey in the paper-to the MTL model co-trained directly on real monkey V1 responses. We computed the robustness score of each model after averaging the accuracies of 3 seeds per model for each corruption type in TIN-TC and normalizing against the baseline test accuracies, i.e. the baseline score is 100%. We find that we can obtain a general increase in robustness when using real neural data. However, co-training on predicted neural responses improves the robustness of the models even more.

Efficient coding theory posits that sensory circuits transform natural signals into neural representations that maximize information transmission subject to resource constraints. Local interneurons are thought to play an important role in these transformations, shaping patterns of circuit activity to facilitate and direct information flow. However, the relationship between these coordinated, nonlinear, circuit-level transformations and the properties of interneurons (e.g., connectivity, activation functions) remains unknown. Here, we propose a normative computational model that establishes such a relationship. Our model is derived from an optimal transport objective that conceptualizes the circuit's input-response function as transforming the inputs to achieve a target response distribution. The circuit, which is comprised of primary neurons that are recurrently connected to a set of local interneurons, continuously optimizes this objective by dynamically adjusting both the synaptic connections between neurons as well as the interneuron activation functions. In an application motivated by redundancy reduction theory, we demonstrate that when the inputs are natural image statistics and the target distribution is a spherical Gaussian, the circuit learns a nonlinear transformation that significantly reduces statistical dependencies in neural responses. Overall, our results provide a framework in which the distribution of circuit responses is systematically and nonlinearly controlled by adjustment of interneuron connectivity and activation functions.

Stimulus-driven brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), such as the P300 speller, rely on using a sequence of sensory stimuli to elicit specific neural responses as control signals, while a user attends to relevant target stimuli that occur within the sequence. In current BCIs, the stimulus presentation schedule is typically generated in a pseudo-random fashion. Given the non-stationarity of brain electrical signals, a better strategy could be to adapt the stimulus presentation schedule in real-time by selecting the optimal stimuli that will maximize the signal-to-noise ratios of the elicited neural responses and provide the most information about the user's intent based on the uncertainties of the data being measured. However, the high-dimensional stimulus space limits the development of algorithms with tractable solutions for optimized stimulus selection to allow for real-time decision-making within the stringent time requirements of BCI processing. We derive a simple analytical solution of an information-based objective function for BCI stimulus selection by transforming the high-dimensional stimulus space into a one-dimensional space that parameterizes the objective function - the prior probability mass of the stimulus under consideration, irrespective of its contents. We demonstrate the utility of our adaptive stimulus selection algorithm in improving BCI performance with results from simulation and real-time human experiments.

Sensory processing is often characterized as implementing probabilistic inference: networks of neurons compute posterior beliefs over unobserved causes given the sensory inputs. How these beliefs are computed and represented by neural responses is much-debated (Fiser et al. 2010, Pouget et al. 2013). A central debate concerns the question of whether neural responses represent samples of latent variables (Hoyer & Hyvarinnen 2003) or parameters of their distributions (Ma et al. 2006) with efforts being made to distinguish between them (Grabska-Barwinska et al. 2013). A separate debate addresses the question of whether neural responses are proportionally related to the encoded probabilities (Barlow 1969), or proportional to the logarithm of those probabilities (Jazayeri & Movshon 2006, Ma et al. 2006, Beck et al. 2012). Here, we show that these alternatives -- contrary to common assumptions -- are not mutually exclusive and that the very same system can be compatible with all of them. As a central analytical result, we show that modeling neural responses in area V1 as samples from a posterior distribution over latents in a linear Gaussian model of the image implies that those neural responses form a linear Probabilistic Population Code (PPC, Ma et al. 2006). In particular, the posterior distribution over some experimenter-defined variable like orientation is part of the exponential family with sufficient statistics that are linear in the neural sampling-based firing rates.

While our study identifies clear separations between model hypothesis classes, our best models still have not reached the consistency ceiling of the neural and behavioral benchmarks we have compared against. All models were simultaneously trained across all eight scenarios of the Physion Dynamics Training Set, constituting around 16,000 total training scenarios (2,000 scenes per scenario) [Bear et al., 2021], with a Each C-SWM [Kipf et al., 2020] model was trained on For each stimulus, we compute the proportion of "hit" responses by The Correlation to A verage Human Response is the Pearson's correlation between the model probability-hit vector and the human proportion-hit vector, across stimuli per scenario. OCP Accuracy of humans and models is the average accuracy, across stimuli per scenario. To give the final values of the two quantities, we then compute the weighted mean and s.e.m. of the above per Note that these values are therefore different for each condition, but always the same across all models. All neural predictivities are reported on heldout conditions and their timepoints.

Subjects watched on average 2.6 Hollywood movies, for

Time perception is fundamental in our daily life. An important feature of time perception is temporal scaling (TS): the ability to generate temporal sequences (e.g., movements) with different speeds. However, it is largely unknown about the mathematical principle underlying TS in the brain.