ANC Workshop - Nina Kudryashova

Speaker: Nina Kudryashova

Title: Latent dynamics in motor cortex: where is the external feedback?

Abstract:

Recent neural recordings show that the activity of thousands of cortical neurons is typically confined to a low-dimensional manifold. As a result, some cortical areas can be modelled by latent dynamical systems. In this presentation, I will talk about inferring latent neural dynamics and controls with sequential variational autoencoders. We will consider a closed-loop behavioural task, in which the motor cortical activity has both the feedforward (motor planning) and the feedback-driven components. The latter has a smaller variance and is largely ignored by unsupervised sequential autoencoders, which motivates us to propose a new weakly supervised architecture that can capture the latent dynamical modes driven by behavioural feedback.