Poisson Variational Autoencoder

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Vafaii, Hadi, Galor, Dekel, Yates, Jacob L.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Vafaii, Hadi
Galor, Dekel
Yates, Jacob L.
author_facet Vafaii, Hadi
Galor, Dekel
Yates, Jacob L.
contents Variational autoencoders (VAEs) employ Bayesian inference to interpret sensory inputs, mirroring processes that occur in primate vision across both ventral (Higgins et al., 2021) and dorsal (Vafaii et al., 2023) pathways. Despite their success, traditional VAEs rely on continuous latent variables, which deviates sharply from the discrete nature of biological neurons. Here, we developed the Poisson VAE (P-VAE), a novel architecture that combines principles of predictive coding with a VAE that encodes inputs into discrete spike counts. Combining Poisson-distributed latent variables with predictive coding introduces a metabolic cost term in the model loss function, suggesting a relationship with sparse coding which we verify empirically. Additionally, we analyze the geometry of learned representations, contrasting the P-VAE to alternative VAE models. We find that the P-VAE encodes its inputs in relatively higher dimensions, facilitating linear separability of categories in a downstream classification task with a much better (5x) sample efficiency. Our work provides an interpretable computational framework to study brain-like sensory processing and paves the way for a deeper understanding of perception as an inferential process.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_14473
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Poisson Variational Autoencoder
Vafaii, Hadi
Galor, Dekel
Yates, Jacob L.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neurons and Cognition
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) employ Bayesian inference to interpret sensory inputs, mirroring processes that occur in primate vision across both ventral (Higgins et al., 2021) and dorsal (Vafaii et al., 2023) pathways. Despite their success, traditional VAEs rely on continuous latent variables, which deviates sharply from the discrete nature of biological neurons. Here, we developed the Poisson VAE (P-VAE), a novel architecture that combines principles of predictive coding with a VAE that encodes inputs into discrete spike counts. Combining Poisson-distributed latent variables with predictive coding introduces a metabolic cost term in the model loss function, suggesting a relationship with sparse coding which we verify empirically. Additionally, we analyze the geometry of learned representations, contrasting the P-VAE to alternative VAE models. We find that the P-VAE encodes its inputs in relatively higher dimensions, facilitating linear separability of categories in a downstream classification task with a much better (5x) sample efficiency. Our work provides an interpretable computational framework to study brain-like sensory processing and paves the way for a deeper understanding of perception as an inferential process.
title Poisson Variational Autoencoder
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neurons and Cognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14473