A Unified, Scalable Framework for Neural Population Decoding
Mehdi Azabou Vinam Arora Venkataramana Ganesh Ximeng Mao Santosh Nachimuthu Michael J. Mendelson Blake Richards Matthew G. Perich Guillaume Lajoie Eva L. Dyer
Our ability to use deep learning approaches to decipher neural activity would
likely benefit from greater scale, in terms of both model size and datasets.
However, the integration of many neural recordings into one unified model is
challenging, as each recording contains the activity of different neurons from
different individual animals. In this paper, we introduce a training framework
and architecture designed to model the population dynamics of neural activity
across diverse, large-scale neural recordings. Our method first tokenizes
individual spikes within the dataset to build an efficient representation of
neural events that captures the fine temporal structure of neural activity. We
then employ cross-attention and a PerceiverIO backbone to further construct a
latent tokenization of neural population activities. Utilizing this
architecture and training framework, we construct a large-scale multi-session
model trained on large datasets from seven nonhuman primates, spanning over 158
different sessions of recording from over 27,373 neural units and over 100
hours of recordings. In a number of different tasks, we demonstrate that our
pretrained model can be rapidly adapted to new, unseen sessions with
unspecified neuron correspondence, enabling few-shot performance with minimal
labels. This work presents a powerful new approach for building deep learning
tools to analyze neural data and stakes out a clear path to training at scale.