# Inferring Population Dynamics in Macaque Cortex

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06040 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06040/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [Practical Lossless Compression with Latent Variables using Bits Back Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04866/) (2019)
- [Neural Latents Benchmark '21: Evaluating latent variable models of neural population activity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04463/) (2021)
- [Bit-Swap: Recursive Bits-Back Coding for Lossless Compression with Hierarchical Latent Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06845/) (2019)
- [Representation learning for neural population activity with Neural Data Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01210/) (2021)
- [Machine learning for neural decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00909/) (2017)
- [Enabling hyperparameter optimization in sequential autoencoders for spiking neural data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07896/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [When predict can also explain: few-shot prediction to select better neural latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14425/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The proliferation of multi-unit cortical recordings over the last two decades, especially in macaques and during motor-control tasks, has generated interest in neural "population dynamics": the time evolution of neural activity across a group of neurons working together. A good model of these dynamics should be able to infer the activity of unobserved neurons within the same population and of the observed neurons at future times. Accordingly, Pandarinath and colleagues have introduced a benchmark to evaluate models on these two (and related) criteria: four data sets, each consisting of firing rates from a population of neurons, recorded from macaque cortex during movement-related tasks. Here we show that simple, general-purpose architectures based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) outperform more "bespoke" models, and indeed outperform all published models on all four data sets in the benchmark. Performance can be improved further still with a novel, hybrid architecture that augments the RNN with self-attention, as in transformer networks. But pure transformer models fail to achieve this level of performance, either in our work or that of other groups. We argue that the autoregressive bias imposed by RNNs is critical for achieving the highest levels of performance. We conclude, however, by proposing that the benchmark be augmented with an alternative evaluation of latent dynamics that favors generative over discriminative models like the ones we propose in this report.