758 research outputs found
A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style
In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create
unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the
content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process
is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities.
However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face
recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of
biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks. Here we
introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates
artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural
representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary
images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images.
Moreover, in light of the striking similarities between performance-optimised
artificial neural networks and biological vision, our work offers a path
forward to an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive
artistic imagery
The effect of noise correlations in populations of diversely tuned neurons
The amount of information encoded by networks of neurons critically depends on the correlation structure of their activity. Neurons with similar stimulus preferences tend to have higher noise correlations than others. In homogeneous populations of neurons this limited range correlation structure is highly detrimental to the accuracy of a population code. Therefore, reduced spike count correlations under attention, after adaptation or after learning have been interpreted as evidence for a more efficient population code. Here we analyze the role of limited range correlations in more realistic, heterogeneous population models. We use Fisher information and maximum likelihood decoding to show that reduced correlations do not necessarily improve encoding accuracy. In fact, in populations with more than a few hundred neurons, increasing the level of limited range correlations can substantially improve encoding accuracy. We found that this improvement results from a decrease in noise entropy that is associated with increasing correlations if the marginal distributions are unchanged. Surprisingly, for constant noise entropy and in the limit of large populations the encoding accuracy is independent of both structure and magnitude of noise correlations
Neural system identification for large populations separating "what" and "where"
Neuroscientists classify neurons into different types that perform similar
computations at different locations in the visual field. Traditional methods
for neural system identification do not capitalize on this separation of 'what'
and 'where'. Learning deep convolutional feature spaces that are shared among
many neurons provides an exciting path forward, but the architectural design
needs to account for data limitations: While new experimental techniques enable
recordings from thousands of neurons, experimental time is limited so that one
can sample only a small fraction of each neuron's response space. Here, we show
that a major bottleneck for fitting convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to
neural data is the estimation of the individual receptive field locations, a
problem that has been scratched only at the surface thus far. We propose a CNN
architecture with a sparse readout layer factorizing the spatial (where) and
feature (what) dimensions. Our network scales well to thousands of neurons and
short recordings and can be trained end-to-end. We evaluate this architecture
on ground-truth data to explore the challenges and limitations of CNN-based
system identification. Moreover, we show that our network model outperforms
current state-of-the art system identification models of mouse primary visual
cortex.Comment: NIPS 201
Optimal Population Coding, Revisited
Cortical circuits perform the computations underlying rapid perceptual decisions within a few dozen milliseconds with each neuron emitting only a few spikes. Under these conditions, the theoretical analysis of neural population codes is challenging, as the most commonly used theoretical tool – Fisher information – can lead to erroneous conclusions about the optimality of different coding schemes. Here we revisit the effect of tuning function width and correlation structure on neural population codes based on ideal observer analysis in both a discrimination and reconstruction task. We show that the optimal tuning function width and the optimal correlation structure in both paradigms strongly depend on the available decoding time in a very similar way. In contrast, population codes optimized for Fisher information do not depend on decoding time and are severely suboptimal when only few spikes are available. In addition, we use the neurometric functions of the ideal observer in the classification task to investigate the differential coding properties of these Fisher-optimal codes for fine and coarse discrimination. We find that the discrimination error for these codes does not decrease to zero with increasing population size, even in simple coarse discrimination tasks. Our results suggest that quite different population codes may be optimal for rapid decoding in cortical computations than those inferred from the optimization of Fisher information
Controlling Perceptual Factors in Neural Style Transfer
Neural Style Transfer has shown very exciting results enabling new forms of
image manipulation. Here we extend the existing method to introduce control
over spatial location, colour information and across spatial scale. We
demonstrate how this enhances the method by allowing high-resolution controlled
stylisation and helps to alleviate common failure cases such as applying ground
textures to sky regions. Furthermore, by decomposing style into these
perceptual factors we enable the combination of style information from multiple
sources to generate new, perceptually appealing styles from existing ones. We
also describe how these methods can be used to more efficiently produce large
size, high-quality stylisation. Finally we show how the introduced control
measures can be applied in recent methods for Fast Neural Style Transfer.Comment: Accepted at CVPR201
Closing the Generalization Gap in One-Shot Object Detection
Despite substantial progress in object detection and few-shot learning,
detecting objects based on a single example - one-shot object detection -
remains a challenge: trained models exhibit a substantial generalization gap,
where object categories used during training are detected much more reliably
than novel ones. Here we show that this generalization gap can be nearly closed
by increasing the number of object categories used during training. Our results
show that the models switch from memorizing individual categories to learning
object similarity over the category distribution, enabling strong
generalization at test time. Importantly, in this regime standard methods to
improve object detection models like stronger backbones or longer training
schedules also benefit novel categories, which was not the case for smaller
datasets like COCO. Our results suggest that the key to strong few-shot
detection models may not lie in sophisticated metric learning approaches, but
instead in scaling the number of categories. Future data annotation efforts
should therefore focus on wider datasets and annotate a larger number of
categories rather than gathering more images or instances per category
Texture Modelling Using Convolutional Neural Networks
We introduce a new model of natural textures based on the feature spaces of convolutional neural networks optimised for object recognition. Samples from the model are of high perceptual quality demonstrating the generative power of neural networks trained in a purely discriminative fashion. Within the model, textures are represented by the correlations between feature maps in several layers of the network. We show that across layers the texture representations increasingly capture the statistical properties of natural images while making object information more and more explicit. Extending this framework to texture transfer, we introduce A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style that can separate and recombine the image content and style of natural images. The algorithm allows us to produce new artistic imagery that combines the content of an arbitrary photograph with the appearance of numerous well-known artworks, thus offering a path towards an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive artistic imagery
Feature Selectivity of the Gamma-Band of the Local Field Potential in Primate Primary Visual Cortex
Extracellular voltage fluctuations (local field potentials, LFPs) reflecting neural mass action are ubiquitous across species and brain regions. Numerous studies have characterized the properties of LFP signals in the cortex to study sensory and motor computations as well as cognitive processes like attention, perception and memory. In addition, its extracranial counterpart β the electroencephalogram β is widely used in clinical applications. However, the link between LFP signals and the underlying activity of local populations of neurons remains largely elusive. Here, we review recent work elucidating the relationship between spiking activity of local neural populations and LFP signals. We focus on oscillations in the gamma-band (30β90 Hz) of the LFP in the primary visual cortex (V1) of the macaque that dominate during visual stimulation. Given that in area V1 much is known about the properties of single neurons and the cortical architecture, it provides an excellent opportunity to study the mechanisms underlying the generation of the LFP
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