Generalization of generative model for neuronal ensemble inference method

Various brain functions that are necessary to maintain life activities materialize through the interaction of countless neurons. Therefore, it is important to analyze the structure of functional neuronal network. To elucidate the mechanism of brain function, many studies are being actively conducted on the structure of functional neuronal ensemble and hub, including all areas of neuroscience. In addition, recent study suggests that the existence of functional neuronal ensembles and hubs contributes to the efficiency of information processing. For these reasons, there is a demand for methods to infer functional neuronal ensembles from neuronal activity data, and methods based on Bayesian inference have been proposed. However, there is a problem in modeling the activity in Bayesian inference. The features of each neuron's activity have non-stationarity depending on physiological experimental conditions. As a result, the assumption of stationarity in Bayesian inference model impedes inference, which leads to destabilization of inference results and degradation of inference accuracy. In this study, we extend the expressivity of the model in the previous study and improve it to a soft clustering method, which can be applied to activity data with non-stationarity. In addition, for the effectiveness of the method, we apply the developed method to synthetic data generated by the leaky-integrate-and-fire model, and discuss the result.

Conditional MoCoGAN for Zero-Shot Video Generation

We propose a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) model for zero-shot video generation. In this study, we have explored zero-shot conditional generation setting. In other words, we generate unseen videos from training samples with missing classes. The task is an extension of conditional data generation. The key idea is to learn disentangled representations in the latent space of a GAN. To realize this objective, we base our model on the motion and content decomposed GAN and conditional GAN for image generation. We build the model to find better-disentangled representations and to generate good-quality videos. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model through experiments on the Weizmann action database and the MUG facial expression database.

Improved Neuronal Ensemble Inference with Generative Model and MCMC

Neuronal ensemble inference is a significant problem in the study of biological neural networks. Various methods have been proposed for ensemble inference from experimental data of neuronal activity. Among them, Bayesian inference approach with generative model was proposed recently. However, this method requires large computational cost for appropriate inference. In this work, we give an improved Bayesian inference algorithm by modifying update rule in Markov chain Monte Carlo method and introducing the idea of simulated annealing for hyperparameter control. We compare the performance of ensemble inference between our algorithm and the original one, and discuss the advantage of our method.

Improved algorithm for neuronal ensemble inference by Monte Carlo method

Neuronal ensemble inference is one of the significant problems in the study of biological neural networks. Various methods have been proposed for ensemble inference from their activity data taken experimentally. Here we focus on Bayesian inference approach for ensembles with generative model, which was proposed in recent work. However, this method requires large computational cost, and the result sometimes gets stuck in bad local maximum solution of Bayesian inference. In this work, we give improved Bayesian inference algorithm for these problems. We modify ensemble generation rule in Markov chain Monte Carlo method, and introduce the idea of simulated annealing for hyperparameter control. We also compare the performance of ensemble inference between our algorithm and the original one.