Adaptive whitening in neural populations with gain-modulating interneurons

Understand

Statistical whitening transformations play a fundamental role in many computational systems, and may also play an important role in biological sensory systems.

• Existing neural circuit models of adaptive whitening operate by modifying synaptic interactions; however, such modifications would seem both too slow and insufficiently reversible.
• Motivated by the extensive neuroscience literature on gain modulation, we propose an alternative model that adaptively whitens its responses by modulating the gains of individual neurons.
• Starting from a novel whitening objective, we derive an online algorithm that whitens its outputs by adjusting the marginal variances of an overcomplete set of projections.