Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17 (NIPS 2004)
Rajesh PN Rao
There is growing evidence from psychophysical and neurophysiological studies that the brain utilizes Bayesian principles for inference and de- cision making. An important open question is how Bayesian inference for arbitrary graphical models can be implemented in networks of spik- ing neurons. In this paper, we show that recurrent networks of noisy integrate-and-fire neurons can perform approximate Bayesian inference for dynamic and hierarchical graphical models. The membrane potential dynamics of neurons is used to implement belief propagation in the log domain. The spiking probability of a neuron is shown to approximate the posterior probability of the preferred state encoded by the neuron, given past inputs. We illustrate the model using two examples: (1) a motion de- tection network in which the spiking probability of a direction-selective neuron becomes proportional to the posterior probability of motion in a preferred direction, and (2) a two-level hierarchical network that pro- duces attentional effects similar to those observed in visual cortical areas V2 and V4. The hierarchical model offers a new Bayesian interpretation of attentional modulation in V2 and V4.