arXiv AI

Rare Events, Real Signals: Functional Ensembles as Units of Computation in Deep Spiking Networks

arXiv:2606. 00073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate how internal representations emerge across hierarchical processing systems by introducing a neuroscience-inspired framework for analyzing deep spiking neural networks (SNN) through the lens of functional connectivity.

arXiv AI
2d ago

SpikeMoE: Brain-Inspired Competitive Routing for Flexible Spiking Mixture-of-Experts

SpikeMoE introduces a spike-based k‑WTA router that uses lateral inhibition and refractory periods to select the top‑K experts based on discrete spike counts, inspired by hippocampal CA1 competition. The framework combines spiking neural network dynamics with mixture‑of‑experts conditional computation and adds a two‑stage missing‑modality module for robust multimodal processing. Experiments on vision, language, and multimodal tasks show that SpikeMoE matches or surpasses ANN baselines while offering energy‑efficient performance.

By Xiaoli Liu, Yujie Liang, Jialin Li, Malu Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Exploring napping paradigm for Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks

The paper proposes a biologically inspired micro‑sleep technique called napping for recurrent spiking neural networks, combining proportional weight scaling with continuous stochastic membrane activity. Experiments on an unsupervised SNN trained with trace‑based STDP on Gabor‑preprocessed MNIST show that well‑tuned napping can match the classification accuracy of conventional weight normalization while offering different clustering characteristics. The study suggests that napping may be preferable when representational structure is more important than raw classification speed, despite its higher simulation cost.

By Andreas Massey, Stefano Nichele, Aliaksandr Hubin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

BrainWideBench: Benchmarking large-scale pretraining and across-animal transfer in multi-region neural recordings

BrainWideBench is a benchmark that evaluates across‑animal transfer on multi‑region neural recordings from 139 mice, covering 276 brain regions. It comprises three task suites—behavior decoding, neural activity prediction, and anatomical organization recovery—to test whether learned representations support diverse downstream objectives. The benchmark shows that while pretraining improves performance over single‑session baselines, current methods vary in transfer ability and none perform uniformly well across all suites, highlighting the challenge of developing general‑purpose neural representations.

By Alexandre Andre, Shivashriganesh P. Mahato, Vinam Arora, Keshav Balaji, Divyansha Lachi, Nanda H. Krishna, Jingyun Xiao, Yizi Zhang, Ximeng Mao, Wenrui Ma, Han Yu, International Brain Laboratory, Daniel Birman, Niccol\`o Bonacchi, Gaelle A. Chapuis, Joana A. Catarino, Felicia Davatolhagh, Mayo Faulkner, Laura Freitas-Silva, Fei Hu, Julia M. Huntenburg, Anup Khanal, In\^es Laranjeira, Petrina Lau, Guido T. Meijer, Nathaniel J. Miska, Jean-Paul Noel, Alejandro Pan-Vazquez, Georg Raiser, Cyrille Rossant, Karolina Z. Socha, Anne E. Urai, Miles J. Wells, Steven J. West, Olivier Winter, Blake Richards, Guillaume Lajoie, Cole Hurwitz, Mehdi Azabou, Matthew R. Whiteway, Liam Paninski, Eva L. Dyer
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

A discrete generative model of neuronal spiking activity on microelectrode arrays

The paper presents a discrete generative model for neuronal spiking activity recorded on microelectrode arrays. It uses a shared vocabulary of spatiotemporal motifs learned by a residual vector‑quantized autoencoder and predicts motif occurrence with a factorized masked transformer. Evaluated on 31 assays from human brain organoids and ex vivo hippocampal tissue, the model achieves superior reconstruction and generation performance compared to baselines and shows that motifs are largely reused across assays.

By Md Sayed Tanveer, Mohammed A. Mostajo-Radji, Ge Wang