Mihai Alexandru Petrovici

arXiv2024

Prospective and retrospective coding in cortical neurons

Brains can process sensory information from different modalities at astonishing speed; this is surprising as the integration of inputs through the membrane of each individual neuron already causes a delayed response. Neuronal recordings {\em in vitro} reveal a possible explanation for this fast processing, in terms of individual neurons advancing their output firing rates with respect to the input, a concept which we refer to as prospective coding. The underlying mechanisms of prospective coding, however, are not completely understood. We propose a mechanistic explanation for individual neurons advancing their output on the level of single action potentials and instantaneous firing rates. We show that the spike generation mechanism can be the source for prospective (advanced) or retrospective (delayed) responses. A simplified Hodgkin-Huxley model identifies sodium inactivation as a source for prospective firing, controlling the timing of the neuron's output as a function of the voltage and its temporal derivative. We further show that slow adaptation processes, such as spike-frequency adaptation or deactivating dendritic currents, represent mechanisms generating prospective firing for inputs that undergo slow temporal modulations. In general, we show that adaptation processes at different time scales can cause advanced neuronal responses to time-varying inputs that are modulated on the corresponding time scales.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2021

Fast and energy-efficient neuromorphic deep learning with first-spike times

For a biological agent operating under environmental pressure, energy consumption and reaction times are of critical importance. Similarly, engineered systems are optimized for short time-to-solution and low energy-to-solution characteristics. At the level of neuronal implementation, this implies achieving the desired results with as few and as early spikes as possible. With time-to-first-spike coding both of these goals are inherently emerging features of learning. Here, we describe a rigorous derivation of a learning rule for such first-spike times in networks of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons, relying solely on input and output spike times, and show how this mechanism can implement error backpropagation in hierarchical spiking networks. Furthermore, we emulate our framework on the BrainScaleS-2 neuromorphic system and demonstrate its capability of harnessing the system's speed and energy characteristics. Finally, we examine how our approach generalizes to other neuromorphic platforms by studying how its performance is affected by typical distortive effects induced by neuromorphic substrates.

cs.NE↗