用流模型从神经活动推断连接分布,避免错误结构干扰。
Identifying Connectivity Distributions from Neural Dynamics Using Flows
- 基于最大熵与连续归一化流,学习连接权重的分布而非单一矩阵。
- 在合成数据和大鼠前额叶记录中成功识别多稳态、环状等动力学结构。
- 适用于复杂连接分布建模,尤其适合低秩神经网络推断场景。
连接结构决定神经计算,但仅凭群体记录难以唯一推断:多种连接结构可产生相同动态。现有方法使用低秩循环神经网络(lrRNN)提取低维潜在动力学与连接结构,实现机制解释。然而标准训练方法可能恢复与真实动态无关的虚假结构。本文首先分析lrRNN中连接结构的可辨识性,确定唯一解存在的条件。为此,提出基于最大熵与连续归一化流(CNFs)的推断框架,通过流匹配训练。不估计单个连接矩阵,而是学习一个在不可辨识成分上最无偏、同时匹配观测动态的连接权重分布。该方法能捕捉重尾等复杂但必要的连接分布特征。在生成多稳态吸引子、极限环和环形吸引子的合成数据上验证,并应用于大鼠前额叶决策过程中的记录。本框架将电路推断从恢复连接转向识别哪些连接结构是计算必需的,哪些是欠约束推断的产物。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Connectivity structure shapes neural computation, but inferring this structure from population recordings is degenerate: multiple connectivity structures can generate identical dynamics. Recent work uses low-rank recurrent neural networks (lrRNNs) to infer low-dimensional latent dynamics and connectivity from observed activity, enabling a mechanistic interpretation of the dynamics. However, standard approaches for training lrRNNs can recover spurious structures irrelevant to the underlying dynamics. We first characterize the identifiability of connectivity structures in lrRNNs and determine conditions under which a unique solution exists. To find such solutions, we develop an inference framework based on maximum entropy and continuous normalizing flows (CNFs), trained via flow matching. Instead of estimating a single connectivity matrix, our method learns a distribution over connection weights that is maximally unbiased over unidentifiable components while matching the observed dynamics. This approach captures complex yet necessary distributions such as heavy-tailed connectivity found in empirical data. We validate our method on synthetic datasets with connectivity structures that generate multistable attractors, limit cycles, and ring attractors, and demonstrate its applicability in recordings from rat frontal cortex during decision-making. Our framework shifts circuit inference from recovering connectivity to identifying which connectivity structures are computationally required, and which are artifacts of underconstrained inference.
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