Developing computational models of neural response is crucial for understanding sensory processing and neural computations. Current state-of-the-art neural network methods use temporal filters to handle temporal dependencies, resulting in an unrealistic and inflexible processing flow. Meanwhile, these methods target trial-averaged firing rates and fail to capture important features in spike trains. This work presents the temporal conditioning spiking latent variable models (TeCoS-LVM) to simulate the neural response to natural visual stimuli. We use spiking neurons to produce spike outputs that directly match the recorded trains. This approach helps to avoid losing information embedded in the original spike trains. We exclude the temporal dimension from the model parameter space and introduce a temporal conditioning operation to allow the model to adaptively explore and exploit temporal dependencies in stimuli sequences in a natural paradigm. We show that TeCoS-LVM models can produce more realistic spike activities and accurately fit spike statistics than powerful alternatives. Additionally, learned TeCoS-LVM models can generalize well to longer time scales. Overall, while remaining computationally tractable, our model effectively captures key features of neural coding systems. It thus provides a useful tool for building accurate predictive computational accounts for various sensory perception circuits.

翻译：开发神经响应的计算模型对于理解感觉处理和神经计算至关重要。当前最先进的神经网络方法使用时间滤波器处理时间依赖关系，导致处理流程不切实际且缺乏灵活性。同时，这些方法针对试次平均的放电率，未能捕捉脉冲序列中的重要特征。本文提出时间条件脉冲潜变量模型（TeCoS-LVM）来模拟对自然视觉刺激的神经响应。我们使用脉冲神经元产生直接匹配记录序列的脉冲输出。这种方法有助于避免丢失原始脉冲序列中嵌入的信息。我们将时间维度排除在模型参数空间之外，并引入时间条件操作，使模型能够以自然方式自适应地探索和利用刺激序列中的时间依赖关系。研究表明，TeCoS-LVM模型能生成更逼真的脉冲活动，且比强大的替代方案更准确地拟合脉冲统计特征。此外，学习后的TeCoS-LVM模型能很好地泛化到更长时间尺度。总体而言，我们的模型在保持计算可处理性的同时，有效捕捉了神经编码系统的关键特征，从而为构建各种感觉知觉回路的准确预测性计算模型提供了有用工具。