Learning of Precise Spike Times with Membrane Potential Dependent Synaptic Plasticity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biologically plausible, membrane potential-based synaptic plasticity rule called MPDP that enables neurons to learn precise spike timings and robustly store spike patterns, surpassing existing methods in capacity and noise resilience.

Contribution

The authors propose MPDP, a novel local unsupervised plasticity rule based on membrane potential, capable of learning precise spike times and distinguishing between weak and strong spikes.

Findings

MPDP reproduces Hebbian STDP for inhibitory synapses.

MPDP achieves high storage capacity for spike associations.

MPDP enables robust memory retrieval in noisy conditions.

Abstract

Precise spatio-temporal patterns of neuronal action potentials underly e.g. sensory representations and control of muscle activities. However, it is not known how the synaptic efficacies in the neuronal networks of the brain adapt such that they can reliably generate spikes at specific points in time. Existing activity-dependent plasticity rules like Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity are agnostic to the goal of learning spike times. On the other hand, the existing formal and supervised learning algorithms perform a temporally precise comparison of projected activity with the target, but there is no known biologically plausible implementation of this comparison. Here, we propose a simple and local unsupervised synaptic plasticity mechanism that is derived from the requirement of a balanced membrane potential. Since the relevant signal for synaptic change is the postsynaptic voltage rather than spike times, we call the plasticity rule Membrane Potential Dependent Plasticity (MPDP). Combining our plasticity mechanism with spike after-hyperpolarization causes a sensitivity of synaptic change to pre- and postsynaptic spike times which can reproduce Hebbian spike timing dependent plasticity for inhibitory synapses as was found in experiments. In addition, the sensitivity of MPDP to the time course of the voltage when generating a spike allows MPDP to distinguish between weak (spurious) and strong (teacher) spikes, which therefore provides a neuronal basis for the comparison of actual and target activity. For spatio-temporal input spike patterns our conceptually simple plasticity rule achieves a surprisingly high storage capacity for spike associations. The sensitivity of the MPDP to the subthreshold membrane potential during training allows robust memory retrieval after learning even in the presence of activity corrupted by noise.