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Evaluating the extent to which homeostatic plasticity learns to compute prediction errors in unstructured neuronal networks

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Abstract

The brain is believed to operate in part by making predictions about sensory stimuli and encoding deviations from these predictions in the activity of “prediction error neurons.” This principle defines the widely influential theory of predictive coding. The precise circuitry and plasticity mechanisms through which animals learn to compute and update their predictions are unknown. Homeostatic inhibitory synaptic plasticity is a promising mechanism for training neuronal networks to perform predictive coding. Homeostatic plasticity causes neurons to maintain a steady, baseline firing rate in response to inputs that closely match the inputs on which a network was trained, but firing rates can deviate away from this baseline in response to stimuli that are mismatched from training. We combine computer simulations and mathematical analysis systematically to test the extent to which randomly connected, unstructured networks compute prediction errors after training with homeostatic inhibitory synaptic plasticity. We find that homeostatic plasticity alone is sufficient for computing prediction errors for trivial time-constant stimuli, but not for more realistic time-varying stimuli. We use a mean-field theory of plastic networks to explain our findings and characterize the assumptions under which they apply.

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Funding

This work was supported by US National Foundation of Science grants NSF-DMS-1654268 and NSF NeuroNex DBI-1707400 and Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) award number FA9550-21-1-0223.

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  1. Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, USA

    Vicky Zhu & Robert Rosenbaum

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  1. Vicky Zhu
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  2. Robert Rosenbaum
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Correspondence to Vicky Zhu.

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Zhu, V., Rosenbaum, R. Evaluating the extent to which homeostatic plasticity learns to compute prediction errors in unstructured neuronal networks. J Comput Neurosci 50, 357–373 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10827-022-00820-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10827-022-00820-0

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