Drakopoulos, Fotios;
Pellatt, Lloyd;
Sabesan, Shievanie;
Xia, Yiqing;
Fragner, Andreas;
Lesica, Nicholas A;
(2025)
Modelling neural coding in the auditory midbrain with high resolution and accuracy.
Nature Machine Intelligence
, 7
(9)
pp. 1478-1493.
10.1038/s42256-025-01104-9.
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Abstract
Computational models of auditory processing can be valuable tools for research and technology development. Models of the cochlea are highly accurate and widely used, but models of the auditory brain lag far behind in both performance and penetration. Here we present ICNet, a convolutional encoder–decoder model of neural coding in the inferior colliculus. We developed ICNet using large-scale intracranial recordings from anaesthetized gerbils, addressing three key modelling challenges that are common across all sensory systems: capturing the full statistical structure of neuronal response patterns; accounting for physiological and experimental non-stationarity; and extracting features of sensory processing that are shared across different brains. ICNet provides highly accurate simulation of multi-unit neural responses to a wide range of complex sounds, including near-perfect responses to speech. It also reproduces key neurophysiological phenomena such as forward masking and dynamic range adaptation. ICNet can be used to simulate activity from thousands of neural units or to provide a compact representation of early central auditory processing through its latent dynamics, facilitating a wide range of hearing and audio applications. It can also serve as a foundation core, providing a baseline neural representation for models of active listening or higher-level auditory processing.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Modelling neural coding in the auditory midbrain with high resolution and accuracy |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s42256-025-01104-9 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01104-9 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > The Ear Institute UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10214449 |
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