Emergence of sparse coding, balance and decorrelation from a biologically-grounded spiking neural network model of learning in the primary visual cortex

Many experimental and computational studies deal with sparseness, balance, and decorrelation in neural networks and explain the presence of these properties as fulfilling requirements related to optimum energy efficiency, network stability, and information representation. These studies leave the question of how these properties arise in the brain unanswered. The present study attempts to address this question using a model built upon the experimentally observed properties of neural responses, homeostasis, and synaptic plasticity. The experimentally observed properties of sparseness, balance, and decorrelation are then expected to emerge from this substrate. A spiking neural model of the primary visual cortex (V1) was investigated. Populations of both inhibitory and excitatory leaky integrate-and-fire neurons with recurrent connections were provided with spiking input from simulated ON and OFF neurons of the lateral geniculate nucleus. This network was provided with natural image stimuli as input. All synapses underwent learning using spike-timing-dependent plasticity learning rules. A homeostatic rule adjusted the weights and thresholds of each neuron based on target homeostatic spiking rates and mean synaptic input values. These experimentally grounded rules resulted in a number of the expected properties of information representation. The network showed a temporally sparse spike response to inputs and this was associated with a sparse code with Gabor-like receptive fields. The network was balanced at both slow and fast time scales; increased excitatory input was balanced by increased inhibition. This balance was associated with decorrelated firing that was observed as population sparseness. This population sparseness was both the cause and result of the decorrelation of receptive fields. These observed emergent properties (balance, temporal sparseness, population sparseness, and decorrelation) indicate that the network is implementing expected principles of information processing: efficient coding, information maximization ('infomax'), and a lateral or single-layer form of predictive coding. These emergent features of the network were shown to be robust to randomized jitter of the values of key simulation parameters.