20,359 research outputs found
Efficient coding of spectrotemporal binaural sounds leads to emergence of the auditory space representation
To date a number of studies have shown that receptive field shapes of early
sensory neurons can be reproduced by optimizing coding efficiency of natural
stimulus ensembles. A still unresolved question is whether the efficient coding
hypothesis explains formation of neurons which explicitly represent
environmental features of different functional importance. This paper proposes
that the spatial selectivity of higher auditory neurons emerges as a direct
consequence of learning efficient codes for natural binaural sounds. Firstly,
it is demonstrated that a linear efficient coding transform - Independent
Component Analysis (ICA) trained on spectrograms of naturalistic simulated
binaural sounds extracts spatial information present in the signal. A simple
hierarchical ICA extension allowing for decoding of sound position is proposed.
Furthermore, it is shown that units revealing spatial selectivity can be
learned from a binaural recording of a natural auditory scene. In both cases a
relatively small subpopulation of learned spectrogram features suffices to
perform accurate sound localization. Representation of the auditory space is
therefore learned in a purely unsupervised way by maximizing the coding
efficiency and without any task-specific constraints. This results imply that
efficient coding is a useful strategy for learning structures which allow for
making behaviorally vital inferences about the environment.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure
Variational Bayesian Inference of Line Spectra
In this paper, we address the fundamental problem of line spectral estimation
in a Bayesian framework. We target model order and parameter estimation via
variational inference in a probabilistic model in which the frequencies are
continuous-valued, i.e., not restricted to a grid; and the coefficients are
governed by a Bernoulli-Gaussian prior model turning model order selection into
binary sequence detection. Unlike earlier works which retain only point
estimates of the frequencies, we undertake a more complete Bayesian treatment
by estimating the posterior probability density functions (pdfs) of the
frequencies and computing expectations over them. Thus, we additionally capture
and operate with the uncertainty of the frequency estimates. Aiming to maximize
the model evidence, variational optimization provides analytic approximations
of the posterior pdfs and also gives estimates of the additional parameters. We
propose an accurate representation of the pdfs of the frequencies by mixtures
of von Mises pdfs, which yields closed-form expectations. We define the
algorithm VALSE in which the estimates of the pdfs and parameters are
iteratively updated. VALSE is a gridless, convergent method, does not require
parameter tuning, can easily include prior knowledge about the frequencies and
provides approximate posterior pdfs based on which the uncertainty in line
spectral estimation can be quantified. Simulation results show that accounting
for the uncertainty of frequency estimates, rather than computing just point
estimates, significantly improves the performance. The performance of VALSE is
superior to that of state-of-the-art methods and closely approaches the
Cram\'er-Rao bound computed for the true model order.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on
Signal Processin
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