  Neural responses in the cortex change over time both systematically, due to
ongoing plasticity and learning, and seemingly randomly, due to various sources
of noise and variability. Most previous work considered each of these
processes, learning and variability, in isolation -- here we study neural
networks exhibiting both and show that their interaction leads to the emergence
of powerful computational properties. We trained neural networks on classical
unsupervised learning tasks, in which the objective was to represent their
inputs in an efficient, easily decodable form, with an additional cost for
neural reliability which we derived from basic biophysical considerations. This
cost on reliability introduced a tradeoff between energetically cheap but
inaccurate representations and energetically costly but accurate ones. Despite
the learning tasks being non-probabilistic, the networks solved this tradeoff
by developing a probabilistic representation: neural variability represented
samples from statistically appropriate posterior distributions that would
result from performing probabilistic inference over their inputs. We provide an
analytical understanding of this result by revealing a connection between the
cost of reliability, and the objective for a state-of-the-art Bayesian
inference strategy: variational autoencoders. We show that the same cost leads
to the emergence of increasingly accurate probabilistic representations as
networks become more complex, from single-layer feed-forward, through
multi-layer feed-forward, to recurrent architectures. Our results provide
insights into why neural responses in sensory areas show signatures of
sampling-based probabilistic representations, and may inform future deep
learning algorithms and their implementation in stochastic low-precision
computing systems.
