arXiv subjects

Abolfazl Ziaeemehr

Publications and source records attributed to Abolfazl Ziaeemehr.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Cohort-amortized personalization: navigating the privacy-utility frontier for virtual brain twins

Personalized generative brain models require individual neuroimaging data that privacy constraints and re-identification risk make difficult to share, while per-subject fitting procedures cost hours of compute -- limiting clinical translation and multi-site collaboration. We introduce cohort-amortized personalization (CAP), which replaces data sharing with model sharing: a neural density estimator is trained on simulations from a mechanistic whole-brain model under a low-rank cohort prior, and only the compact estimator is distributed, so new subjects are personalized in seconds on their own data alone. To make this prior both compact and atlas-independent, a cross-atlas autoencoder (CrossCoder) maps connectomes from 20 anatomical atlases into a shared latent space, enabling deployment across sites with heterogeneous atlases. We validate CAP on two cohorts: 21 patients with drug-resistant epilepsy (epileptogenic-zone localization F1=0.56) and 832 subjects from the 1000BRAINS aging cohort (predicted age r=0.44); in both, CAP matches or exceeds per-subject inference with hours-to-seconds speed-up. Because the shared artifact couples a cohort prior to a mechanistic simulator, it can serve as a mechanistic surrogate supporting in-silico experimentation and synthetic-cohort generation without raw-data access -- a governance-audited alternative we term synthetic access, allowing for wider adoption of personalized modeling in more diverse settings.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2025

sbi reloaded: a toolkit for simulation-based inference workflows

Scientists and engineers use simulators to model empirically observed phenomena. However, tuning the parameters of a simulator to ensure its outputs match observed data presents a significant challenge. Simulation-based inference (SBI) addresses this by enabling Bayesian inference for simulators, identifying parameters that match observed data and align with prior knowledge. Unlike traditional Bayesian inference, SBI only needs access to simulations from the model and does not require evaluations of the likelihood function. In addition, SBI algorithms do not require gradients through the simulator, allow for massive parallelization of simulations, and can perform inference for different observations without further simulations or training, thereby amortizing inference. Over the past years, we have developed, maintained, and extended sbi, a PyTorch-based package that implements Bayesian SBI algorithms based on neural networks. The sbi toolkit implements a wide range of inference methods, neural network architectures, sampling methods, and diagnostic tools. In addition, it provides well-tested default settings, but also offers flexibility to fully customize every step of the simulation-based inference workflow. Taken together, the sbi toolkit enables scientists and engineers to apply state-of-the-art SBI methods to black-box simulators, opening up new possibilities for aligning simulations with empirically observed data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Emergence of global synchronization in directed excitatory networks of type I neurons

The collective behaviour of neural networks depends on the cellular and synaptic properties of the neurons. The phase-response curve (PRC) is an experimentally obtainable measure of cellular properties that quantifies the shift in the next spike time of a neuron as a function of the phase at which stimulus is delivered to that neuron. The neuronal PRCs can be classified as having either purely positive values (type I) or distinct positive and negative regions (type II). Networks of type 1 PRCs tend not to synchronize via mutual excitatory synaptic connections. We study the synchronization properties of identical type I and type II neurons, assuming unidirectional synapses. Performing the linear stability analysis and the numerical simulation of the extended Kuramoto model, we show that feedforward loop motifs favour synchronization of type I excitatory and inhibitory neurons, while feedback loop motifs destroy their synchronization tendency. Moreover, large directed networks, either without feedback motifs or with many of them, have been constructed from the same undirected backbones, and a high synchronization level is observed for directed acyclic graphs with type I neurons. It has been shown that, the synchronizability of type I neurons depends on both the directionality of the network connectivity and the topology of its undirected backbone. The abundance of feedforward motifs enhances the synchronizability of the directed acyclic graphs.

nlin.AO↗