
Yanis BahrounFlatiron Institute · Center for Computational Biology - Neuroscience
Yanis Bahroun
PhD
About
18
Publications
2,058
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
78
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
May 2019 - present
Flatiron Institute
Position
- Fellow
March 2018 - September 2018
Flatiron Institute
Position
- Analyst
January 2016 - January 2018
Education
September 2014 - September 2015
September 2011 - September 2012
September 2011 - September 2013
Publications
Publications (18)
An established normative approach for understanding the algorithmic basis of neural computation is to derive online algorithms from principled computational objectives and evaluate their compatibility with anatomical and physiological observations. Similarity matching objectives have served as successful starting points for deriving online algorith...
While effective, the backpropagation (BP) algorithm exhibits limitations in terms of biological plausibility, computational cost, and suitability for online learning. As a result, there has been a growing interest in developing alternative biologically plausible learning approaches that rely on local learning rules. This study focuses on the primar...
An established normative approach for understanding the algorithmic basis of neural computation is to derive online algorithms from principled computational objectives and evaluate their compatibility with anatomical and physiological observations. Similarity matching objectives have served as successful starting points for deriving online algorith...
Predictive coding (PC) has emerged as an influential normative model of neural computation with numerous extensions and applications. As such, much effort has been put into mapping PC faithfully onto cortex, but there are issues that remain unresolved or controversial. In particular, current implementations often involve separate value and error ne...
K-means defines one of the most employed centroid-based clustering algorithms with performances tied to the data's embedding. Intricate data embeddings have been designed to push $K$-means performances at the cost of reduced theoretical guarantees and interpretability of the results. Instead, we propose preserving the intrinsic data space and augme...
The brain effortlessly solves blind source separation (BSS) problems, but the algorithm it uses remains elusive. In signal processing, linear BSS problems are often solved by Independent Component Analysis (ICA). To serve as a model of a biological circuit, the ICA neural network (NN) must satisfy at least the following requirements: 1. The algorit...
Cortical pyramidal neurons receive inputs from multiple distinct neural populations and integrate these inputs in separate dendritic compartments. We explore the possibility that cortical microcircuits implement canonical correlation analysis (CCA), an unsupervised learning method that projects the inputs onto a common subspace so as to maximize th...
Learning to detect content-independent transformations from data is one of the central problems in biological and artificial intelligence. An example of such problem is unsupervised learning of a visual motion detector from pairs of consecutive video frames. Rao and Ruderman formulated this problem in terms of learning infinitesimal transformation...
The development of neuromorphic hardware and modeling of biological neural networks requires algorithms with local learning rules. Artificial neural networks using local learning rules to perform principal subspace analysis (PSA) and clustering have recently been derived from principled objective functions. However, no biologically plausible networ...
We design an interpretable clustering algorithm aware of the nonlinear structure of image manifolds. Our approach leverages the interpretability of $K$-means applied in the image space while addressing its clustering performance issues. Specifically, we develop a measure of similarity between images and centroids that encompasses a general class of...
The backpropagation algorithm is an invaluable tool for training artificial neural networks; however, because of a weight sharing requirement, it does not provide a plausible model of brain function. Here, in the context of a two-layer network, we derive an algorithm for training a neural network which avoids this problem by not requiring explicit...
To guide behavior, the brain extracts relevant features from high-dimensional data streamed by sensory organs. Neuroscience experiments demonstrate that the processing of sensory inputs by cortical neurons is modulated by instructive signals which provide context and task-relevant information. Here, adopting a normative approach, we model these ins...
Cortical pyramidal neurons receive inputs from multiple distinct neural populations and integrate these inputs in separate dendritic compartments. We explore the possibility that cortical microcircuits implement Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), an unsupervised learning method that projects the inputs onto a common subspace so as to maximize th...
Unsupervised learning techniques, such as clustering and sparse coding , have been adapted for use with data sets exhibiting nonlinear relationships through the use of kernel machines. These techniques often require an explicit computation of the kernel matrix, which becomes expensive as the number of inputs grows, making it unsuitable for efficien...
Unsupervised learning permits the development of algorithms that are able to adapt to a variety of different data sets using the same underlying rules thanks to the autonomous discovery of discriminating features during training. Recently, a new class of Hebbian-like and local unsupervised learning rules for neural networks have been developed that...
Multi-layer models of sparse coding (deep dictionary learning) and dimensionality reduction (PCANet) have shown promise as unsupervised learning models for image classification tasks. However, the pure implementations of these models have limited generalisation capabilities and high computational cost. This work introduces the Deep Hebbian Network...
Unsupervised learning permits the development of algorithms that are able to adapt to a variety of different data sets using the same underlying rules thanks to the autonomous discovery of discriminating features during training. Recently, a new class of Hebbian-like and local unsupervised learning rules for neural networks have been developed that...