Unsupervised Discovery of Dynamic Neural Circuits

Colin Graber, Ryan Loh, Yurii Vlasov, Alexander Schwing

TL;DR: We develop 'dynamic neural relational inference', a variational autoencoder model that can explicitly and interpretably represent the hidden dynamic relations between neurons.

Keywords: dynamic neural relational inference, variational autoencoder, cortical processing, neural dynamics, brain computation

Abstract: What can we learn about the functional organization of cortical microcircuits from large-scale recordings of neural activity? To obtain an explicit and interpretable model of time-dependent functional connections between neurons and to establish the dynamics of the cortical information flow, we develop 'dynamic neural relational inference' (dNRI). We study both synthetic and real-world neural spiking data and demonstrate that the developed method is able to uncover the dynamic relations between neurons more reliably than existing baselines.