VSAONLINE-10. Madison Cotteret. University of Groningen.
Evgeny Osipov
Dear all,
Welcome to the next talk on VSAONLINE by Madison Cotteret from University of Groningen, The Netherlands!
Date: May 19, 2025
Time: 20:00 GMT
Zoom: https://ltu-se.zoom.us/j/65564790287
Title: Continuous attractor/integrator embeddings with sparse block codes
Abstract: Continuous attractor networks (CANs) are widely accepted to model the temporary retention of information in the brain through persistent recurrent activity, but are notoriously sensitive to synaptic and neural nonidealities. Introducing structured synaptic heterogeneity mitigates noise-induced diffusion of the represented variable, but reduces the idealised continuum of states to a set of discrete attractor states. This work demonstrates that periodic grid-cell-like codes support CANs which represent continuous variables with high precision, while remaining robust to noise, by increasing the path length of the line attractor in the neural state space. Together, this provides a description of how biological RNNs could perform robust computation using low-dimensional nonlinear neural manifolds and programmable flows upon them.
Best,
Evgeny