UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

The Hamiltonian Brain: Efficient Probabilistic Inference with Excitatory-Inhibitory Neural Circuit Dynamics

Aitchison, L; Lengyel, M; (2016) The Hamiltonian Brain: Efficient Probabilistic Inference with Excitatory-Inhibitory Neural Circuit Dynamics. PLOS Computational Biology , 12 (12) , Article e1005186. 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005186. Green open access

[thumbnail of journal.pcbi.1005186.pdf]
Preview
Text
journal.pcbi.1005186.pdf - Published Version

Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

Probabilistic inference offers a principled framework for understanding both behaviour and cortical computation. However, two basic and ubiquitous properties of cortical responses seem difficult to reconcile with probabilistic inference: neural activity displays prominent oscillations in response to constant input, and large transient changes in response to stimulus onset. Indeed, cortical models of probabilistic inference have typically either concentrated on tuning curve or receptive field properties and remained agnostic as to the underlying circuit dynamics, or had simplistic dynamics that gave neither oscillations nor transients. Here we show that these dynamical behaviours may in fact be understood as hallmarks of the specific representation and algorithm that the cortex employs to perform probabilistic inference. We demonstrate that a particular family of probabilistic inference algorithms, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), naturally maps onto the dynamics of excitatory-inhibitory neural networks. Specifically, we constructed a model of an excitatory-inhibitory circuit in primary visual cortex that performed HMC inference, and thus inherently gave rise to oscillations and transients. These oscillations were not mere epiphenomena but served an important functional role: speeding up inference by rapidly spanning a large volume of state space. Inference thus became an order of magnitude more efficient than in a non-oscillatory variant of the model. In addition, the network matched two specific properties of observed neural dynamics that would otherwise be difficult to account for using probabilistic inference. First, the frequency of oscillations as well as the magnitude of transients increased with the contrast of the image stimulus. Second, excitation and inhibition were balanced, and inhibition lagged excitation. These results suggest a new functional role for the separation of cortical populations into excitatory and inhibitory neurons, and for the neural oscillations that emerge in such excitatory-inhibitory networks: enhancing the efficiency of cortical computations.

Type: Article
Title: The Hamiltonian Brain: Efficient Probabilistic Inference with Excitatory-Inhibitory Neural Circuit Dynamics
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005186
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005186
Language: English
Additional information: © 2016 Aitchison, Lengyel. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
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 Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Gatsby Computational Neurosci Unit
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1542815
Downloads since deposit
81Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item