Papers › Optimal packing of attractor states in neural representations
Optimal packing of attractor states in neural representations
John J. Vastola
Animals' internal states reflect variables like their position in space, orientation, decisions, and motor actions -- but how should these internal states be arranged? Internal states which frequently transition between one another should be close enough that transitions can happen quickly, but not so close that neural noise significantly impacts the stability of those states, and how reliably they can be encoded and decoded. In this paper, we study the problem of striking a balance between these two concerns, which we call an `optimal packing' problem since it resembles mathematical problems like sphere packing. While this problem is generally extremely difficult, we show that symmetries in environmental transition statistics imply certain symmetries of the optimal neural representations, which allows us in some cases to exactly solve for the optimal state arrangement. We focus on two toy cases: uniform transition statistics, and cyclic transition statistics. Code is available at https://github.com/john-vastola/optimal-packing-neurreps23 .
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections