Connectionists: REMINDER: World wide VVTNS series (6th season): Wednesday, November 5, 2025, at 11:00 am ET - Georges Debrégeas CNRS, Paris

[David Hansel]

[image: VVTNS.png]
https://www.wwtns.online
<https://streaklinks.com/A9c7PbbpKY7PxB6PaAJWGD3-/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wwtns.online>
-
on twitter: wwtns at TheoreticalWide

You are cordially invited to  the lecture

Georges Debrégeas

CNRS, Paris

 on the topic of

Latent-aligned generative models uncover shared structure in spontaneous
whole-brain dynamics?

The lecture will be held on zoom on Wednesday, November 5, 2025, at *11:00
am ET *

> To receive the link: https://www.wwtns.online/register-page
>

*Abstract: *Assessing how brain activity generalizes across individuals is
a central challenge in experimental neuroscience. Traditional task- or
stimulus-driven approaches align data through trial averaging and
anatomical registration, but these methods fail for spontaneous activity,
where no shared temporal reference exists. In this talk, I will introduce a
statistical framework, called latent-aligned Restricted Boltzmann Machines,
to build a common representational space from whole-brain recordings of
spontaneous activity in multiple zebrafish larvae. This shared latent
space, composed of spatially localized co-activation motifs or cell
assemblies, allows bidirectional mapping of brain states: activity patterns
from one fish can be encoded and decoded into another. The translated
activity patterns retain their original spatial structure and show high
plausibility within the recipient brain. We further use this shared space
to segment spontaneous activity into discrete brain states and we quantify
their Markovian transition statistics. Remarkably, these state-to-state
dynamics are stereotyped across individuals, suggesting that spontaneous
activity reflects intrinsic computational priors of neural processing.
Together, these results demonstrate how probabilistic generative modeling
can bridge individual variability and reveal conserved organizational
principles of vertebrate brains.

*About VVTNS : Launched as the World Wide  Theoretical Neuroscience Seminar
(WWTNS) in November 2020 and renamed in homage to Carl van Vreeswijk in
Memoriam (April 20, 2022), Speakers have the occasion to talk about
theoretical aspects of their work which cannot be discussed in a setting
where the majority of the audience consists of experimentalists. The
seminars, **held on Wednesdays at 11 am ET,**  are 45-50 min long followed
by a discussion. The talks are recorded with authorization of the speaker
and are available to everybody on our YouTube channel.*
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