Quantifying Extrinsic Curvature in Neural Manifolds
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The neural manifold hypothesis postulates that the activity of a neural population forms a low-dimensional manifold whose structure reflects that of the encoded task variables. In this work, we combine topological deep generative models and extrinsic Riemannian geometry to introduce a novel approach for studying the structure of neural manifolds. This approach (i) computes an explicit parameterization of the manifolds and (ii) estimates their local extrinsic curvature—hence quantifying their shape within the neural state space. Importantly, we prove that our methodology is invariant with respect to transformations that do not bear meaningful neuroscience information, such as permutation of the order in which neurons are recorded. We show empirically that we correctly estimate the geometry of synthetic manifolds generated from smooth deformations of circles, spheres, and tori, using realistic noise levels. We additionally validate our methodology on simulated and real neural data, and show that we recover geometric structure known to exist in hippocampal place cells. We expect this approach to open new avenues of inquiry into geometric neural correlates of perception and behavior.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it