Frequency-specific patterns of neural activity are traditionally interpreted as sustained rhythmic oscillations, and related to cognitive mechanisms such as attention, high level visual processing or motor control. While alpha waves (8--12\,Hz) are known to closely resemble short sinusoids, and thus are revealed by Fourier analysis or wavelet transforms, there is an evolving debate that electromagnetic neural signals are composed of more complex waveforms that cannot be analyzed by linear filters and traditional signal representations. In this paper, we propose to learn dedicated representations of such recordings using a multivariate convolutional sparse coding (CSC) algorithm. Applied to electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) data, this method is able to learn not only prototypical temporal waveforms, but also associated spatial patterns so their origin can be localized in the brain. Our algorithm is based on alternated minimization and a greedy coordinate descent solver that leads to state-of-the-art running time on long time series. To demonstrate the implications of this method, we apply it to MEG data and show that it is able to recover biological artifacts. More remarkably, our approach also reveals the presence of non-sinusoidal mu-shaped patterns, along with their topographic maps related to the somatosensory cortex.

Neural time-series data contain a wide variety of prototypical signal waveforms (atoms) that are of significant importance in clinical and cognitive research. One of the goals for analyzing such data is hence to extract such `shift-invariant' atoms. Even though some success has been reported with existing algorithms, they are limited in applicability due to their heuristic nature. Moreover, they are often vulnerable to artifacts and impulsive noise, which are typically present in raw neural recordings. In this study, we address these issues and propose a novel probabilistic convolutional sparse coding (CSC) model for learning shift-invariant atoms from raw neural signals containing potentially severe artifacts. In the core of our model, which we call $\alpha$CSC, lies a family of heavy-tailed distributions called $\alpha$-stable distributions. We develop a novel, computationally efficient Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm for inference. The maximization step boils down to a weighted CSC problem, for which we develop a computationally efficient optimization algorithm. Our results show that the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art convergence speeds. Besides, $\alpha$CSC is significantly more robust to artifacts when compared to three competing algorithms: it can extract spike bursts, oscillations, and even reveal more subtle phenomena such as cross-frequency coupling when applied to noisy neural time series.

For some images, descriptions written by multiple people are consistent with each other. But for other images, descriptions across people vary considerably. In other words, some images are specific - they elicit consistent descriptions from different people - while other images are ambiguous. Applications involving images and text can benefit from an understanding of which images are specific and which ones are ambiguous. For instance, consider text-based image retrieval. If a query description is moderately similar to the caption (or reference description) of an ambiguous image, that query may be considered a decent match to the image. But if the image is very specific, a moderate similarity between the query and the reference description may not be sufficient to retrieve the image. In this paper, we introduce the notion of image specificity. We present two mechanisms to measure specificity given multiple descriptions of an image: an automated measure and a measure that relies on human judgement. We analyze image specificity with respect to image content and properties to better understand what makes an image specific. We then train models to automatically predict the specificity of an image from image features alone without requiring textual descriptions of the image. Finally, we show that modeling image specificity leads to improvements in a text-based image retrieval application.