Shaomin Zhang

Tengjun Liu, Julia Gygax, Julian Rossbroich et al.

Invasive cortical brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) can significantly improve the life quality of motor-impaired patients. Nonetheless, externally mounted pedestals pose an infection risk, which calls for fully implanted systems. Such systems, however, must meet strict latency and energy constraints while providing reliable decoding performance. While recurrent spiking neural networks (RSNNs) are ideally suited for ultra-low-power, low-latency processing on neuromorphic hardware, it is unclear whether they meet the above requirements. To address this question, we trained RSNNs to decode finger velocity from cortical spike trains (CSTs) of two macaque monkeys. First, we found that a large RSNN model outperformed existing feedforward spiking neural networks (SNNs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) in terms of their decoding accuracy. We next developed a tiny RSNN with a smaller memory footprint, low firing rates, and sparse connectivity. Despite its reduced computational requirements, the resulting model performed substantially better than existing SNN and ANN decoders. Our results thus demonstrate that RSNNs offer competitive CST decoding performance under tight resource constraints and are promising candidates for fully implanted ultra-low-power BMIs with the potential to revolutionize patient care.

Mohamed Baha Ben Ticha, Xingchen Ran, Guillaume Saldanha et al.

Speech Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) offer promising solutions to people with severe paralysis unable to communicate. A number of recent studies have demonstrated convincing reconstruction of intelligible speech from surface electrocorticographic (ECoG) or intracortical recordings by predicting a series of phonemes or words and using downstream language models to obtain meaningful sentences. A current challenge is to reconstruct speech in a streaming mode by directly regressing cortical signals into acoustic speech. While this has been achieved recently using intracortical data, further work is needed to obtain comparable results with surface ECoG recordings. In particular, optimizing neural decoders becomes critical in this case. Here we present an offline speech decoding pipeline based on an encoder-decoder deep neural architecture, integrating Vision Transformers and contrastive learning to enhance the direct regression of speech from ECoG signals. The approach is evaluated on two datasets, one obtained with clinical subdural electrodes in an epileptic patient, and another obtained with the fully implantable WIMAGINE epidural system in a participant of a motor BCI trial. To our knowledge this presents a first attempt to decode speech from a fully implantable and wireless epidural recording system offering perspectives for long-term use.

Tengjun Liu, Yansong Chua, Yiwei Zhang et al.

Despite its better bio-plausibility, goal-driven spiking neural network (SNN) has not achieved applicable performance for classifying biological spike trains, and showed little bio-functional similarities compared to traditional artificial neural networks. In this study, we proposed the motorSRNN, a recurrent SNN topologically inspired by the neural motor circuit of primates. By employing the motorSRNN in decoding spike trains from the primary motor cortex of monkeys, we achieved a good balance between classification accuracy and energy consumption. The motorSRNN communicated with the input by capturing and cultivating more cosine-tuning, an essential property of neurons in the motor cortex, and maintained its stability during training. Such training-induced cultivation and persistency of cosine-tuning was also observed in our monkeys. Moreover, the motorSRNN produced additional bio-functional similarities at the single-neuron, population, and circuit levels, demonstrating biological authenticity. Thereby, ablation studies on motorSRNN have suggested long-term stable feedback synapses contribute to the training-induced cultivation in the motor cortex. Besides these novel findings and predictions, we offer a new framework for building authentic models of neural computation.

Xiaoke Shang, Gehui Li, Zhiying Jiang et al.

The correction of exposure-related issues is a pivotal component in enhancing the quality of images, offering substantial implications for various computer vision tasks. Historically, most methodologies have predominantly utilized spatial domain recovery, offering limited consideration to the potentialities of the frequency domain. Additionally, there has been a lack of a unified perspective towards low-light enhancement, exposure correction, and multi-exposure fusion, complicating and impeding the optimization of image processing. In response to these challenges, this paper proposes a novel methodology that leverages the frequency domain to improve and unify the handling of exposure correction tasks. Our method introduces Holistic Frequency Attention and Dynamic Frequency Feed-Forward Network, which replace conventional correlation computation in the spatial-domain. They form a foundational building block that facilitates a U-shaped Holistic Dynamic Frequency Transformer as a filter to extract global information and dynamically select important frequency bands for image restoration. Complementing this, we employ a Laplacian pyramid to decompose images into distinct frequency bands, followed by multiple restorers, each tuned to recover specific frequency-band information. The pyramid fusion allows a more detailed and nuanced image restoration process. Ultimately, our structure unifies the three tasks of low-light enhancement, exposure correction, and multi-exposure fusion, enabling comprehensive treatment of all classical exposure errors. Benchmarking on mainstream datasets for these tasks, our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, paving the way for more sophisticated and unified solutions in exposure correction.