Saket Navlakha

Reticulate leaf venation in Pilea peperomioides is a Voronoi diagram

The paper shows that reticulate leaf venation in Pilea peperomioides forms an approximate Voronoi diagram around hydathodes and proposes a model based on auxin transport.

How the olfactory bulb maintains stable odor manifolds amid adaptation and representational drift

The paper identifies three forms of representational change in the olfactory bulb during odor adaptation and shows how local plasticity and network structure maintain a stable odor manifold.

Sparse, random sampling is sufficient for central tolerance

The paper shows that sparse, random sampling of self peptides in the thymus is sufficient for T cell tolerance to most peripheral self peptides, supported by experimental data and machine learning analysis.

Growth Cost and Transport Efficiency Tradeoffs Define Root System Optimization Across Varying Developmental Stages and Environments in Arabidopsis

The paper develops Ariadne to analyze root system architecture tradeoffs in Arabidopsis, finding developmental stage, genotype, and manganese availability influence cost-efficiency balance.

An evolutionarily conserved scheme for reformatting odor concentration in early olfactory circuits

The paper identifies an evolutionarily conserved mechanism in olfactory circuits that preserves odor concentration information through diverse second-order neuron responses, despite flat population-level averages.

Stochastic coding: a conserved feature of odor representations and its implications for odor discrimination

The paper shows that stochastic coding in odor representations improves discrimination in both flies and mice by leveraging variability in inhibitory circuits.

A neural theory for counting memories

The paper proposes a neural circuit theory for counting stimulus occurrences, showing it exists in insect mushroom bodies and may be conserved in mammals.

Neural network features distinguish chemosensory stimuli in Caenorhabditis elegans.

The paper uses graph-theoretic features of neural activity in C. elegans to predict chemosensory stimulus identity and valence, showing these features outperform activity measures alone.

A correspondence between normalization strategies in artificial and biological neural networks

This paper explores parallels between normalization strategies in artificial and biological neural networks, arguing for functional equivalence and proposing a new algorithm inspired by synaptic scaling.

A distributed algorithm to maintain and repair the trail networks of arboreal ants

This paper describes a distributed algorithm inspired by turtle ants to maintain and repair trail networks, validated on synthetic and real-world networks.

A neural algorithm for a fundamental computing problem

The paper describes how the fly's olfactory circuit solves a similarity search problem using a novel algorithm inspired by locality-sensitive hashing, improving performance on benchmark datasets.