Decoding Pixel-Level Image Features from Two-Photon Calcium Signals of Macaque Visual Cortex

Neural Decoding of Visual Information Across Different Neural Recording Modalities and Approaches

Vision plays a peculiar role in intelligence. Visual information, forming a large part of the sensory information, is fed into the human brain to formulate various types of cognition and behaviours that make humans become intelligent agents. Recent advances have led to the development of brain-inspired algorithms and models for machine vision. One of the key components of these methods is the utilization of the computational principles underlying biological neurons. Additionally, advanced experimental neuroscience techniques have generated different types of neural signals that carry essential visual information. Thus, there is a high demand for mapping out functional models for reading out visual information from neural signals. Here, we briefly review recent progress on this issue with a focus on how machine learning techniques can help in the development of models for contending various types of neural signals, from fine-scale neural spikes and single-cell calcium imaging to coarse-scale electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging recordings of brain signals.

Solving the spike feature information vanishing problem in spiking deep Q network with potential based normalization

Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) are successfully applied to many pattern recognition domains. The SNNs-based deep structure has achieved considerable results in perceptual tasks, such as image classification and target detection. However, applying deep SNNs in reinforcement learning (RL) tasks is still a problem to be explored. Although there have been previous studies on the combination of SNNs and RL, most focus on robotic control problems with shallow networks or using the ANN-SNN conversion method to implement spiking deep Q networks (SDQN). In this study, we mathematically analyzed the problem of the disappearance of spiking signal features in SDQN and proposed a potential-based layer normalization (pbLN) method to train spiking deep Q networks directly. Experiment shows that compared with state-of-art ANN-SNN conversion method and other SDQN works, the proposed pbLN spiking deep Q networks (PL-SDQN) achieved better performance on Atari game tasks.