Does the neuronal noise in cortex help generalization?
Neural activity is highly variable in response to repeated stimuli.We used an open dataset, the Allen Brain Observatory, to quantify the distribution of responses to repeated natural movie presentations.A large fraction of responses are best fit by log-normal distributions or Gaussian mixtures with two components.These distributions are similar to those from units in deep neural networks with dropout.Using a separate set of electrophysiological recordings, we constructed a population coupling model as a control for state-dependent activity fluctuations and found that the model residuals also show non-Gaussian distributions.We then analyzed responses across trials from multiple sections of different movie clips and observed that the noise in cortex aligns better with in-clip versus out-of-clip stimulus variations.We argue that noise is useful for generalization when it moves along representations of different exemplars in-class, similar to the structure of cortical noise.
We study the structure of noise in the brain and find it may help generalization by moving representations along in-class stimulus variations.