Looking for a way to modify scheduling of synapses/pre/post evaluation

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1

Greetings!

I’m implementing an unpublished learning rule that needs to “push” some information from a Synapses model, through a NeuronGroup to another Synapses model, when neurons in that group spike. For example, let’s say I have a feedforward network that looks like this:

S1 → NG → S2

The S1 model includes some dynamic variable S1.x. Anytime a postsynaptic neuron fires, I want to increment a variable NG.y by x. So I define the on_post for S1 to be:

S1 = Synapses(..., model='dx/dt = -x / tau : 1', on_post ='y_post += x')

But when a neuron in NG spikes, I don’t just want to update NG.y though. I also want to propagate that new value to the downstream synapses S2, storing it in the dynamic variable S2.z. So I define the on_pre for S2 to be:

S2 = Synapses(..., model='dz/dt = -z / tau : 1', on_pre='z += y_pre')

The problem is that when a neuron in NG spikes, the updated NG.y value doesn’t appear in S2.z until that neuron spikes again.

If I understand the output of scheduling_summary() correctly, it is clear why this is the case: All on_pre handlers are run before any on_post handlers, which means the order argument cannot be used to process S1’s on_post before S2’s on_pre.

Because the rule I’m implementing is latency-based (and relies on single spikes in many cases), this information needs to be propagated instantaneously from S1 → S2 when a spike in NG occurs.

I’m looking for a way to reschedule the evaluation of SynapticPathway objects such that S1’s on_post runs before S2’s on_pre. Either that, or some clean way to bypass the scheduling issue all together. Naturally, I could add a network_operation that checks for spikes on every time-step, but I worry that it would be too slow (given all the index wrangling that would be involved).

Thanks in advance for any help you folks can provide.

Regards,
Owen

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Hi Owen. I am not 100% sure that I correctly understood but I don’t quite agree with this statement:

It is true that by default all pre pathways are executed before all post pathways, but this is only because of the order argument. All pre pathways get order -1 and all post pathways get order +1. Oh, or do you mean that you cannot affect it by the order argument of Synapses? This is true and not optimal, it would have been better to use the provide order argument ± 1 for the pathways… Anyway, you can change the order argument of the pathways, e.g. with:

S2.pre.order = 2  # make pre-pathway run later

If the order arguments become too confusing, you could also invent a completely new scheduling slot binding things together in a more meaningful way. Something like

S1.post.when = 'value_propagation'
S1.post.order = -1
S2.pre.when = 'value_propagation'
S2.pre.order = 1
# Use your Network object if you don't use the "magic" system:
magic_network.schedule = ['start', 'groups', 'thresholds', 'value_propagation', 'synapses', 'resets', 'end']
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Hi Marcel,

Brilliant! Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for your quick reply.

Owen

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