Paper List

期刊: ArXiv Preprint
发布日期: 2026-03-11
Computational NeuroscienceMachine Learning

JEDI: Jointly Embedded Inference of Neural Dynamics

University of Montreal | Mila - Quebec AI Institute

Anirudh Jamkhandi, Ali Korojy, Olivier Codol, Guillaume Lajoie, Matthew G. Perich
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IN SHORT: This paper addresses the core challenge of inferring context-dependent neural dynamics from noisy, high-dimensional recordings using a single unified model that generalizes across behavioral conditions.

核心创新

  • Methodology Proposes JEDI, a novel hypernetwork framework that jointly learns contextual embeddings and RNN weights to model neural dynamics across multiple tasks and contexts in a unified model.
  • Methodology Demonstrates that low-rank constraints on RNN weights enable learning of robust and generalizable embeddings that capture shared dynamical structure across conditions.
  • Biology Successfully applies the framework to real monkey motor cortex data, revealing distinct spectral reorganization between movement preparation and execution phases.

主要结论

  • JEDI achieves high reconstruction accuracy (R² > 0.94) on synthetic multi-task data while learning embeddings that enable near-perfect task classification and significant cross-task generalization.
  • Spectral analysis reveals JEDI accurately recovers ground truth dynamical properties: eigenvalues expand along the imaginary axis with increasing input frequency (1-10 Hz), and fixed point structures closely match ground truth task-trained networks.
  • Applied to monkey motor cortex recordings, JEDI identifies distinct dynamical regimes: during movement execution, eigenvalues cluster near the unit circle (edge of stability), while preparation phases show eigenvalues clustered within the unit circle with real-axis excursions.
研究空白: Existing data-constrained RNNs (dRNNs) typically assume fixed weights for single behavioral conditions, lacking the flexibility to model context-dependent variations and generalize across tasks, which limits their ability to capture the brain's computational flexibility.

摘要: Animal brains flexibly and efficiently achieve many behavioral tasks with a single neural network. A core goal in modern neuroscience is to map the mechanisms of the brain’s flexibility onto the dynamics underlying neural populations. However, identifying task-specific dynamical rules from limited, noisy, and high-dimensional experimental neural recordings remains a major challenge, as experimental data often provide only partial access to brain states and dynamical mechanisms. While recurrent neural networks (RNNs) directly constrained neural data have been effective in inferring underlying dynamical mechanisms, they are typically limited to single-task domains and struggle to generalize across behavioral conditions. Here, we introduce JEDI, a hierarchical model that captures neural dynamics across tasks and contexts by learning a shared embedding space over RNN weights. This model recapitulates individual samples of neural dynamics while scaling to arbitrarily large and complex datasets, uncovering shared structure across conditions in a single, unified model. Using simulated RNN datasets, we demonstrate that JEDI accurately learns robust, generalizable, condition-specific embeddings. By reverse-engineering the weights learned by JEDI, we show that it recovers ground truth fixed point structures and unveils key features of the underlying neural dynamics in the eigenspectra. Finally, we apply JEDI to motor cortex recordings during monkey reaching to extract mechanistic insight into the neural dynamics of motor control. Our work shows that joint learning of contextual embeddings and recurrent weights provides scalable and generalizable inference of brain dynamics from recordings alone.