Learnable latent embeddings for joint behavioural and neural analysis
Application of CEBRA-Behavior to rat hippocampus data (Grosmark and Buzsáki, 2016), showing position/neural activity (left), overlayed with decoding obtained by CEBRA. The current point in embedding space is highlighted (right). CEBRA obtains a median absolute error of 5cm (total track length: 160cm; see pre-print for details). Video is played at 2x real-time speed.
CEBRA applied to mouse primary visual cortex, collected at the Allen Institute (de Vries et al. 2020, Siegle et al. 2021). 2-photon and Neuropixels recordings are embedded with CEBRA using DINO frame features as labels. The embedding is used to decode the video frames using a kNN decoder on the CEBRA-Behavior embedding from the test set.
Abstract
Mapping behavioural actions to neural activity is a fundamental goal of neuroscience. As our ability to record large neural and behavioural data increases, there is growing interest in modeling neural dynamics during adaptive behaviors to probe neural representations. In particular, neural latent embeddings can reveal underlying correlates of behavior, yet, we lack non-linear techniques that can explicitly and flexibly leverage joint behavior and neural data to uncover neural dynamics. Here, we fill this gap with a novel encoding method, CEBRA, that jointly uses behavioural and neural data in a (supervised) hypothesis- or (self-supervised) discovery-driven manner to produce both consistent and high-performance latent spaces. We show that consistency can be used as a metric for uncovering meaningful differences, and the inferred latents can be used for decoding. We validate its accuracy and demonstrate our tool's utility for both calcium and electrophysiology datasets, across sensory and motor tasks, and in simple or complex behaviors across species. It allows for single and multi-session datasets to be leveraged for hypothesis testing or can be used label-free. Lastly, we show that CEBRA can be used for the mapping of space, uncovering complex kinematic features, produces consistent latent spaces across 2-photon and Neuropixels data, and can provide rapid, high-accuracy decoding of natural movies from visual cortex.
Pre-Print
The pre-print is available on arxiv at arxiv.org/abs/2204.00673.
Software
You can find our official implementation of the CEBRA algorithm on GitHub: Watch and Star the repository to be notified of future updates and releases. You can also follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our mailing list for updates on the project.
If you are interested in collaborations, please contact us via email.
BibTeX
Please cite our paper as follows:
author={Schneider, Steffen and Lee, Jin Hwa and Mathis, Mackenzie Weygandt},
title={Learnable latent embeddings for joint behavioural and neural analysis},
journal={Nature},
year={2023},
month={May},
day={03},
issn={1476-4687},
doi={10.1038/s41586-023-06031-6},
url={https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06031-6}
}