Determinantal point process attention over grid cell code supports out of distribution generalization.

Deep neural networks have made tremendous gains in emulating human-like intelligence, and have been used increasingly as ways of understanding how the brain may solve the complex computational problems on which this relies. However, these still fall short of, and therefore fail to provide insight into how the brain supports strong forms of generalization of which humans are capable. One such case is out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization - successful performance on test examples that lie outside the distribution of the training set. Here, we identify properties of processing in the brain that may contribute to this ability. We describe a two-part algorithm that draws on specific features of neural computation to achieve OOD generalization, and provide a proof of concept by evaluating performance on two challenging cognitive tasks. First we draw on the fact that the mammalian brain represents metric spaces using grid cell code (e.g., in the entorhinal cortex): abstract representations of relational structure, organized in recurring motifs that cover the representational space. Second, we propose an attentional mechanism that operates over the grid cell code using determinantal point process (DPP), that we call DPP attention (DPP-A) - a transformation that ensures maximum sparseness in the coverage of that space. We show that a loss function that combines standard task-optimized error with DPP-A can exploit the recurring motifs in the grid cell code, and can be integrated with common architectures to achieve strong OOD generalization performance on analogy and arithmetic tasks. This provides both an interpretation of how the grid cell code in the mammalian brain may contribute to generalization performance, and at the same time a potential means for improving such capabilities in artificial neural networks.

Cell-type-specific inhibitory circuitry from a connectomic census of mouse visual cortex.

Mammalian cortex features a vast diversity of neuronal cell types, each with characteristic anatomical, molecular and functional properties. Synaptic connectivity powerfully shapes how each cell type participates in the cortical circuit, but mapping connectivity rules at the resolution of distinct cell types remains difficult. Here, we used millimeter-scale volumetric electron microscopy1 to investigate the connectivity of all inhibitory neurons across a densely-segmented neuronal population of 1352 cells spanning all layers of mouse visual cortex, producing a wiring diagram of inhibitory connections with more than 70,000 synapses. Taking a data-driven approach inspired by classical neuroanatomy, we classified inhibitory neurons based on the relative targeting of dendritic compartments and other inhibitory cells and developed a novel classification of excitatory neurons based on the morphological and synaptic input properties. The synaptic connectivity between inhibitory cells revealed a novel class of disinhibitory specialist targeting basket cells, in addition to familiar subclasses. Analysis of the inhibitory connectivity onto excitatory neurons found widespread specificity, with many interneurons exhibiting differential targeting of certain subpopulations spatially intermingled with other potential targets. Inhibitory targeting was organized into "motif groups," diverse sets of cells that collectively target both perisomatic and dendritic compartments of the same excitatory targets. Collectively, our analysis identified new organizing principles for cortical inhibition and will serve as a foundation for linking modern multimodal neuronal atlases with the cortical wiring diagram.

NEURD: automated proofreading and feature extraction for connectomics.

We are now in the era of millimeter-scale electron microscopy (EM) volumes collected at nanometer resolution (Shapson-Coe et al., 2021; Consortium et al., 2021). Dense reconstruction of cellular compartments in these EM volumes has been enabled by recent advances in Machine Learning (ML) (Lee et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2021; Lu et al., 2021; Macrina et al., 2021). Automated segmentation methods can now yield exceptionally accurate reconstructions of cells, but despite this accuracy, laborious post-hoc proofreading is still required to generate large connectomes free of merge and split errors. The elaborate 3-D meshes of neurons produced by these segmentations contain detailed morphological information, from the diameter, shape, and branching patterns of axons and dendrites, down to the fine-scale structure of dendritic spines. However, extracting information about these features can require substantial effort to piece together existing tools into custom workflows. Building on existing open-source software for mesh manipulation, here we present "NEURD", a software package that decomposes each meshed neuron into a compact and extensively-annotated graph representation. With these feature-rich graphs, we implement workflows for state of the art automated post-hoc proofreading of merge errors, cell classification, spine detection, axon-dendritic proximities, and other features that can enable many downstream analyses of neural morphology and connectivity. NEURD can make these new massive and complex datasets more accessible to neuroscience researchers focused on a variety of scientific questions.

Functional connectomics reveals general wiring rule in mouse visual cortex.

To understand how the brain computes, it is important to unravel the relationship between circuit connectivity and function. Previous research has shown that excitatory neurons in layer 2/3 of the primary visual cortex of mice with similar response properties are more likely to form connections. However, technical challenges of combining synaptic connectivity and functional measurements have limited these studies to few, highly local connections. Utilizing the millimeter scale and nanometer resolution of the MICrONS dataset, we studied the connectivity-function relationship in excitatory neurons of the mouse visual cortex across interlaminar and interarea projections, assessing connection selectivity at the coarse axon trajectory and fine synaptic formation levels. A digital twin model of this mouse, that accurately predicted responses to arbitrary video stimuli, enabled a comprehensive characterization of the function of neurons. We found that neurons with highly correlated responses to natural videos tended to be connected with each other, not only within the same cortical area but also across multiple layers and visual areas, including feedforward and feedback connections, whereas we did not find that orientation preference predicted connectivity. The digital twin model separated each neuron's tuning into a feature component (what the neuron responds to) and a spatial component (where the neuron's receptive field is located). We show that the feature, but not the spatial component, predicted which neurons were connected at the fine synaptic scale. Together, our results demonstrate the "like-to-like" connectivity rule generalizes to multiple connection types, and the rich MICrONS dataset is suitable to further refine a mechanistic understanding of circuit structure and function.

CAVE: Connectome Annotation Versioning Engine.

Advances in Electron Microscopy, image segmentation and computational infrastructure have given rise to large-scale and richly annotated connectomic datasets which are increasingly shared across communities. To enable collaboration, users need to be able to concurrently create new annotations and correct errors in the automated segmentation by proofreading. In large datasets, every proofreading edit relabels cell identities of millions of voxels and thousands of annotations like synapses. For analysis, users require immediate and reproducible access to this constantly changing and expanding data landscape. Here, we present the Connectome Annotation Versioning Engine (CAVE), a computational infrastructure for immediate and reproducible connectome analysis in up-to petascale datasets (~1mm3) while proofreading and annotating is ongoing. For segmentation, CAVE provides a distributed proofreading infrastructure for continuous versioning of large reconstructions. Annotations in CAVE are defined by locations such that they can be quickly assigned to the underlying segment which enables fast analysis queries of CAVE's data for arbitrary time points. CAVE supports schematized, extensible annotations, so that researchers can readily design novel annotation types. CAVE is already used for many connectomics datasets, including the largest datasets available to date.