Papers for

neuroscience research teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Complex systems reveal distinct modes of collective computation

An information-geometric formulation of distributed computation

Abstract: Understanding how complex systems perform computations, i.e. how they store, transmit, and transform information across their components, is a major goal across the natural sciences. However, characterising genuinely collective computations across multiple inputs and outputs that cannot be reduced to contributions from individual components remains an open problem. In this work, we introduce $Φ\text{ID}^{IG}$, a geometric theory of information dynamics that captures irreducible collective phenomena and enables a complete decomposition of multi-input multi-output operations into interpretable computational modes, providing a complete informational profile of a system. We first validate our framework to identify and quantify distinct computational modes in discrete and Gaussian systems with known ground truth. We then apply it to uncover the computational architecture of complex systems across synthetic and real-world scenarios, including chaotic maps, where distinct universality classes are associated with characteristic modes of computation; brain anatomy of over 100 mammalian species, revealing an evolutionary shift towards more distributed computation in the human neocortex; and financial markets, where collective computations recover the modular organisation of market sectors. Overall, our results show how complex systems can be quantitatively investigated through multidimensional computational portraits derived from the geometry of their underlying probability distributions.

Mon 2 NovInformation Theory
The gist
Understanding how many parts of a complex system work together to process information is a big challenge. The authors introduce a new way to break down and describe how groups of parts collectively compute, without simply looking at each part alone. They tested their approach on simulated data and applied it to diverse areas like brain structures and financial markets, finding unique patterns relevant to each system. This method provides a new lens to quantitatively study the information processing of complex systems.
Open → 2611.03545v1