The Intrinsic Manifold of Spontaneous Activity Constrains Cortical Responses to Naturalistic Stimuli
Jung-Hoon Kim, Yizhen Z. Zhang, Owen Mackenzie, Xiaokai Wang, David Brang, Scott Peltier, Zhongming Liu
This paper shows that the low-dimensional manifold of spontaneous brain activity can represent responses to naturalistic stimuli, using a deep variational autoencoder trained on resting-state fMRI data.
bioRxiv · Feb 23, 2026 · PreprintNeuroscience