arXiv:2507.02264q-bio.NCcs.LG2025-07

用大语言模型解码脑区神经活动,预测鱼类行为动作。

NLP4Neuro: Sequence-to-sequence learning for neural population decoding

  • 将预训练语言模型直接用于脑区神经信号到行为的映射。
  • 70亿参数专家混合模型在长时序尾部运动预测上准确率显著提升。
  • 结果可解释性强,能定位关键神经元,适合脑科学与机器学习交叉研究者。

解析动物行为如何由神经活动产生是神经科学的基础目标。然而,在哺乳动物大脑中,数千个神经元构成密集连接网络,行为背后的计算过程难以解析。近年来,作为现代大语言模型(LLMs)核心的Transformer架构已被证明在小型神经群体解码中表现优异。这些模型得益于大规模文本预训练,其序列到序列学习能力展现出对新任务和数据模态的良好泛化性,或可应用于更广泛的大脑活动记录解码。本文提出NLP4Neuro,系统评估现成大语言模型在脑区范围神经信号解码中的表现。我们利用同时采集的斑马鱼幼体钙成像数据和行为数据,在视觉运动刺激下测试模型性能。结果显示,使用从自然语言数据中预训练的权重后,模型解码能力显著提升;其中,近期提出的专家混合模型DeepSeek Coder-7b在长期尾部运动预测中达到更高精度,并生成空间分布一致、高度可解释的神经元重要性读数。NLP4Neuro表明,大语言模型在脑区范围神经环路解析中具有强大潜力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Delineating how animal behavior arises from neural activity is a foundational goal of neuroscience. However, as the computations underlying behavior unfold in networks of thousands of individual neurons across the entire brain, this presents challenges for investigating neural roles and computational mechanisms in large, densely wired mammalian brains during behavior. Transformers, the backbones of modern large language models (LLMs), have become powerful tools for neural decoding from smaller neural populations. These modern LLMs have benefited from extensive pre-training, and their sequence-to-sequence learning has been shown to generalize to novel tasks and data modalities, which may also confer advantages for neural decoding from larger, brain-wide activity recordings. Here, we present a systematic evaluation of off-the-shelf LLMs to decode behavior from brain-wide populations, termed NLP4Neuro, which we used to test LLMs on simultaneous calcium imaging and behavior recordings in larval zebrafish exposed to visual motion stimuli. Through NLP4Neuro, we found that LLMs become better at neural decoding when they use pre-trained weights learned from textual natural language data. Moreover, we found that a recent mixture-of-experts LLM, DeepSeek Coder-7b, significantly improved behavioral decoding accuracy, predicted tail movements over long timescales, and provided anatomically consistent highly interpretable readouts of neuron salience. NLP4Neuro demonstrates that LLMs are highly capable of informing brain-wide neural circuit dissection.

神经解码大模型脑科学序列建模

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