Bayesian Computation Emerges in Generic Cortical Microcircuits through Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity

The principles by which networks of neurons compute, and how spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) of synaptic weights generates and maintains their computational function, are unknown. Preceding work has shown that soft winner-take-all (WTA) circuits, where pyramidal neurons inhibit each other via interneurons, are a common motif of cortical microcircuits. We show through theoretical analysis and computer simulations that Bayesian computation is induced in these network motifs through STDP in combination with activity-dependent changes in the excitability of neurons. The fundamental components of this emergent Bayesian computation are priors that result from adaptation of neuronal excitability and implicit generative models for hidden causes that are created in the synaptic weights through STDP. In fact, a surprising result is that STDP is able to approximate a powerful principle for fitting such implicit generative models to high-dimensional spike inputs: Expectation Maximization. Our results suggest that the experimentally observed spontaneous activity and trial-to-trial variability of cortical neurons are essential features of their information processing capability, since their functional role is to represent probability distributions rather than static neural codes. Furthermore it suggests networks of Bayesian computation modules as a new model for distributed information processing in the cortex. Author Summary: How do neurons learn to extract information from their inputs, and perform meaningful computations? Neurons receive inputs as continuous streams of action potentials or “spikes” that arrive at thousands of synapses. The strength of these synapses - the synaptic weight - undergoes constant modification. It has been demonstrated in numerous experiments that this modification depends on the temporal order of spikes in the pre- and postsynaptic neuron, a rule known as STDP, but it has remained unclear, how this contributes to higher level functions in neural network architectures. In this paper we show that STDP induces in a commonly found connectivity motif in the cortex - a winner-take-all (WTA) network - autonomous, self-organized learning of probabilistic models of the input. The resulting function of the neural circuit is Bayesian computation on the input spike trains. Such unsupervised learning has previously been studied extensively on an abstract, algorithmical level. We show that STDP approximates one of the most powerful learning methods in machine learning, Expectation-Maximization (EM). In a series of computer simulations we demonstrate that this enables STDP in WTA circuits to solve complex learning tasks, reaching a performance level that surpasses previous uses of spiking neural networks.