Paper:
Deep Learning Models of the Retinal Response to Natural Scenes
A central challenge in sensory neuroscience is to understand neural computations and circuit mechanisms that underlie the encoding of ethologically relevant, natural stimuli. In multilayered neural circuits, nonlinear processes such as synaptic transmission and spiking dynamics present a significant obstacle to the creation of accurate computational models of responses to natural stimuli. Here we demonstrate that deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) capture retinal responses to natural scenes nearly to within the variability of a cell's response, and are markedly more accurate than linear-nonlinear (LN) models and Generalized Linear Models (GLMs). Moreover, we find two additional surprising properties of CNNs: they are less susceptible to overfitting than their LN counterparts when trained on small amounts of data, and generalize better when tested on stimuli drawn from a different distribution (e.g. between natural scenes and white noise). An examination of the learned CNNs reveals several properties. First, a richer set of feature maps is necessary for predicting the responses to natural scenes compared to white noise. Second, temporally precise responses to slowly varying inputs originate from feedforward inhibition, similar to known retinal mechanisms. Third, the injection of latent noise sources in intermediate layers enables our model to capture the sub-Poisson spiking variability observed in retinal ganglion cells. Fourth, augmenting our CNNs with recurrent lateral connections enables them to capture contrast adaptation as an emergent property of accurately describing retinal responses to natural scenes. These methods can be readily generalized to other sensory modalities and stimulus ensembles. Overall, this work demonstrates that CNNs not only accurately capture sensory circuit responses to natural scenes, but also can yield information about the circuit's internal structure and function.

Review:
This interesting study models the response of ganglion cells in the retina of a salamander. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time a convolutional neural network is applied to this fairly well studied modeling problem. The authors report better than state of the art performance. Furthermore, and perhaps most interesting in my humble opinion, they report that these models generalize relatively well between artificial white noise stimuli and natural stimuli. This has been a glaring weakness of previous models. Thus I find these results novel and exciting.
Modeling studies of neural responses are usually measured on two scales: a. Their contribution to our understanding of the neural physiology, architecture or any other biological aspect. b. Model accuracy, where the aim is to provide a model which is better than the state of the art. To the best of my understanding, this study mostly focuses on the latter, i.e. provide a better than state of the art model. If I am misunderstanding, then it would probably be important to stress the biological insights gained from the study. Yet if indeed modeling accuracy is the focus, it's important to provide a fair comparison to the state of the art, and I see a few caveats in that regard: 1. The authors mention the GLM model of Pillow et al. which is pretty much state of the art, but a central point in that paper was that coupling filters between neurons are very important for the accuracy of the model. These coupling filters are omitted here which makes the comparison slightly unfair. I would strongly suggest comparing to a GLM with coupling filters. Furthermore, I suggest presenting data (like correlation coefficients) from previous studies to make sure the comparison is fair and in line with previous literature. 2. The authors note that the LN model needed regularization, but then they apply regularization (in the form of a cropped stimulus) to both LN models and GLMs. To the best of my recollection the GLM presented by pillow et al. did not crop the image but used L1 regularization for the filters and a low rank approximation to the spatial filter. To make the comparison as fair as possible I think it is important to try to reproduce the main features of previous models.  Minor notes: 1. Please define the dashed lines in fig. 2A-B and 4B. 2. Why is the training correlation increasing with the amount of training data for the cutout LN model (fig. 4A)? 3. I think figure 6C is a bit awkward, it implies negative rates, which is not the case, I would suggest using a second y-axis or another visualization which is more physically accurate. 4. Please clarify how the model in fig. 7 was trained. Was it on full field flicker stimulus changing contrast with a fixed cycle? If the duration of the cycle changes (shortens, since as the authors mention the model cannot handle longer time scales), will the time scale of adaptation shorten as reported in e.g Smirnakis et al. Nature 1997.