Role of Homeostasis in Learning Sparse Representations

Neurons in the input layer of primary visual cortex in primates develop edge-like receptive fields. One approach to understanding the emergence of this response is to state that neural activity has to efficiently represent sensory data with respect to the statistics of natural scenes. Furthermore, it is believed that such an efficient coding is achieved using a competition across neurons so as to generate a sparse representation, that is, where a relatively small number of neurons are simultaneously active. Indeed, different models of sparse coding coupled with Hebbian learning and homeostasis have been proposed that successfully match the observed emergent response. However, the specific role of homeostasis in learning such sparse representations is still largely unknown. By quantitatively assessing the efficiency of the neural representation during learning, we derive a cooperative homeostasis mechanism which optimally tunes the competition between neurons within the sparse coding...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: NECO
• Authors: Laurent U. Perrinet
• Keywords: Homeostasis, NECO 2010, Neurons, Sparse