  The classical sparse coding (SC) model represents visual stimuli as a linear
combination of a handful of learned basis functions that are Gabor-like when
trained on natural image data. However, the Gabor-like filters learned by
classical sparse coding far overpredict well-tuned simple cell receptive field
profiles observed empirically. While neurons fire sparsely, neuronal
populations are also organized in physical space by their sensitivity to
certain features. In V1, this organization is a smooth progression of
orientations along the cortical sheet. A number of subsequent models have
either discarded the sparse dictionary learning framework entirely or whose
updates have yet to take advantage of the surge in unrolled, neural dictionary
learning architectures. A key missing theme of these updates is a stronger
notion of \emph{structured sparsity}. We propose an autoencoder architecture
(WLSC) whose latent representations are implicitly, locally organized for
spectral clustering through a Laplacian quadratic form of a bipartite graph,
which generates a diverse set of artificial receptive fields that match primate
data in V1 as faithfully as recent contrastive frameworks like Local Low
Dimensionality, or LLD \citep{lld} that discard sparse dictionary learning. By
unifying sparse and smooth coding in models of the early visual cortex through
our autoencoder, we also show that our regularization can be interpreted as
early-stage specialization of receptive fields to certain classes of stimuli;
that is, we induce a weak clustering bias for later stages of cortex where
functional and spatial segregation (i.e. topography) are known to occur. The
results show an imperative for \emph{spatial regularization} of both the
receptive fields and firing rates to begin to describe feature disentanglement
in V1 and beyond.
