Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16 (NIPS 2003)
Yuval Aviel, David Horn, Moshe Abeles
A balanced network leads to contradictory constraints on memory models, as exemplified in previous work on accommodation of synfire chains. Here we show that these constraints can be overcome by introducing a 'shadow' inhibitory pattern for each excitatory pattern of the model. This is interpreted as a double- balance principle, whereby there exists both global balance between average excitatory and inhibitory currents and local balance between the currents carrying coherent activity at any given time frame. This principle can be applied to networks with Hebbian cell assemblies, leading to a high capacity of the associative memory. The number of possible patterns is limited by a combinatorial constraint that turns out to be P=0.06N within the specific model that we employ. This limit is reached by the Hebbian cell assembly network. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that such high memory capacities are demonstrated in the asynchronous state of models of spiking neurons.