Homeostatic Plasticity Enables Stable, Flexible, and Tunable Assemblies

Homeostatic excitatory-to-excitatory plasticity with inhibitory-to-excitatory homeostatic stabilization yields a stable continuum of synaptic strengths, making assembly structure non-binary in recurrent spiking networks.

• Why it matters: Hebbian assembly models often produce only weak-or-maximally-strong connectivity, limiting how flexibly memories could be encoded and tuned.
• What they did: The authors combine Hebbian excitatory-to-excitatory plasticity with inhibitory-to-excitatory synapses that stabilize excitatory firing at a target, using recurrent spiking networks plus mean-field theory to map synaptic-weight dynamics.
• The result: They identify a line attractor in synaptic weight space where firing rates stay invariant but gain and response times remain tunable, and correlated excitatory spiking can break the attractor unless correlations are shared with inhibitory inputs.

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