Spike Localization Network (SLN)

Joint spike localization and motion drift correction for Neuropixels recordings, solved via alternating optimization between a learned localization network (CNN or Transformer) and the DREDge drift estimator.

Aggregate spike projections (x-y, x-z, z-y) under three pipelines on dataset1_p1, ~2.48 M spikes. Top: MP raw (no motion correction, ρ̄ = 0.267). Middle: MP+DREDge canonical (standard pipeline baseline, ρ̄ = 0.568). Bottom: the CNN-SLN all-spike post-DREDge ep20 result (this work, ρ̄ = 0.663, +0.095 over the canonical baseline). The bottom row shows cleaner depth bands than the middle one — motion-driven smearing is reduced.

TL;DR

Neuropixels recordings contain two confounded problems: (1) localizing each spike's 3-D source position, and (2) correcting slow mechanical drift of the probe. The standard pipeline solves them sequentially (monopolar localization → DREDge), which is suboptimal because drift biases localization and localization errors corrupt drift estimates.

This repo implements a joint solver: a self-supervised Spike Localization Network (SLN) is trained to predict per-spike positions whose drift-corrected 2-D histograms are temporally consistent (mean pairwise NCC ↑) and not collapsed (mean spatial entropy ↑), with DREDge held fixed within each inner phase and re-estimated between outer iterations.

On dataset1_p1 (NP 1.0, ~2.48 M spikes, 32.6 min) the best learned model achieves ρ̄ = 0.663 vs MP+DREDge's 0.568 (+0.095) — a 16.7% improvement in temporal consistency without representational collapse.

See docs/PROBLEM_STATEMENT.md for the full problem framing and docs/COMPARISON.md for the side-by-side scoreboard with file paths to every visualization.

Repo layout

spikeLocalizationNetwork/
├── src/                         core source (training, models, viz, utilities)
│   ├── relative_xyz_common.py  CNN-SLN model (RelativeXYZNet)
│   ├── transformer_sln.py      Transformer-SLN model (TransformerSLN)
│   ├── soft_histogram.py       differentiable 2-D Gaussian soft histogram
│   ├── histogram_losses.py     pairwise NCC, spatial entropy, tether loss
│   ├── dredge_wrapper.py       thin wrapper around spikeinterface's DREDge
│   ├── depth_raster.py         viz infrastructure (depth raster panels)
│   ├── aggregate_projections.py viz infrastructure (xy/xz/zy panels)
│   ├── localization_movie.py   viz infrastructure (per-second frames)
│   ├── window_video_common.py  recording loader
│   ├── train_relative_xyz_model.py  CNN supervised pretrain
│   ├── train_sln_dredge_iterative.py joint outer-loop trainer
│   ├── train_sln_postdredge.py frozen-motion fine-tune (CNN or TR)
│   ├── apply_sln_to_all_spikes.py CNN forward + motion correction over all spikes
│   ├── apply_transformer_sln_to_all_spikes.py  TR forward (no motion)
│   ├── apply_cnn_sln_raw_to_all_spikes.py      CNN forward (no motion)
│   ├── make_depth_raster.py            depth raster (color = log α)
│   ├── make_depth_raster_color_z.py    depth raster (color = z)
│   ├── make_xy_pairwise_correlation.py x-y pairwise NCC matrix
│   ├── make_spatial_entropy.py         spatial entropy H(t) trace
│   ├── make_aggregate_projections.py   x-y / x-z / z-y aggregate panels
│   ├── make_localization_movie.py      per-second mp4
│   ├── make_displacement_colormap.py   figT1: spike displacement vs baseline
│   ├── make_local_alpha_scatter.py     figT5: local coord scatter colored by α
│   ├── make_alpha_plots.py             α vs (x,y,z) + temporal variability
│   ├── make_mp_comparison_scatter.py   global + local scatter vs MP+DREDge
│   ├── make_dredge_motion_comparison.py 3 DREDge motion-field comparison
│   ├── make_convergence_trace.py       per-iteration training loss curve
│   ├── make_interactive_localization_html.py  interactive-visualizer (self-contained HTML)
│   └── run_dredge2_cnn_all_ep20.py     example: second-round DREDge runner
│
├── figures/
│   ├── per_method/   final viz package per method (depth raster, ncc, entropy,
│   │                 aggregate projections, alpha, figT1, figT5, …)
│   ├── comparison/   cross-method scatter + motion-field comparisons
│   └── interactive_visualizer.png   screenshot of the interactive-visualizer
│
└── docs/
    ├── PROBLEM_STATEMENT.md   the joint-localization-and-drift problem
    ├── COMPARISON.md          method scoreboard + viz coverage matrix
    └── scoreboard.csv         numerical metrics in CSV form

Method

Architecture

Two SLN variants are implemented:

model	params	structure
CNN-SLN (RelativeXYZNet)	~402K	3 Conv1d blocks (BN, GELU, MaxPool) on the 10-channel waveform → Flatten → 3-layer MLP head producing (Δx, Δy, Δz)
Transformer-SLN (TransformerSLN)	~580K	per-channel Linear(90→128) + row/col positional embeddings (5×2 NP-2.0 geometry; works for NP-1.0 too) → 4-layer pre-LN encoder, 8 heads, d=128 → mean-pool tokens, MLP, head → (Δx, Δy, Δz)

Both predict offsets (Δx, Δy, Δz) from the channel-neighborhood centroid ("anchor") of the spike's peak channel.

Training

1. Supervised pretrain — Huber-loss regression against monopolar (MP) localization targets. AdamW, 50 epochs, gives 30-35 μm 3-D RMSE.
2. Joint optimization — alternating block-coordinate descent for K=8 outer iterations:
   • Phase A (DREDge): run spikeinterface.estimate_motion(method="dredge_ap") on the SLN's current localizations. Treated as a black box.
   • Phase B (SLN): for E inner epochs, update θ via gradient descent on L(θ) = -λ_ρ·ρ̄(θ, T) - λ_H·H̄(θ, T) + λ_teth·L_teth(θ) using a differentiable 2-D soft histogram (σ=4 μm Gaussian scatter on a 4 μm voxel grid). The drift field T is held fixed within each phase.

In practice with all-spike data, one outer iteration with 20 inner SLN epochs reaches the fixed point: the second DREDge round produces a motion estimate 99.7% correlated with the first (1.18 μm RMS difference) so further outer iterations don't move the result. This is documented in figures/comparison/dredge_motion_comparison.png and discussed in docs/COMPARISON.md.

Loss components

• ρ̄ (pairwise NCC) — primary objective. Mean normalized cross-correlation between drift-corrected soft 2-D histograms within a sliding temporal window (W=30 s). Rewards temporal consistency.
• H̄ (spatial entropy) — guard against representational collapse. Mean Shannon entropy of per-bin normalized histograms.
• L_teth (tether) — MSE between current and pretrained xy localizations. Prevents anatomically implausible solutions during joint optimization.

Weights: λ_ρ=1.0, λ_H=0.1, λ_teth=0.01. AdamW, lr=1e-4 (or 1e-5 for fine-tune resumes), grad clip 5.0 (or 1.0 for resumes).

Headline results — dataset1_p1

Drift-corrected mean pairwise NCC on the canonical 4 μm σ=4 soft histogram grid:

method	apply ρ̄	apply H̄	Δρ̄ vs MP+DREDge
MP raw (no MC)	0.267	6.27	−0.301
MP+DREDge canonical	0.568	8.25	0 (baseline)
CNN-SLN 500K postd. ep20	0.528	8.06	−0.040
CNN-SLN all-spike postd. ep20	0.663	8.14	+0.095 ← best
CNN-SLN all-spike ep20 + DREDge2	0.641	8.14	+0.073
TR-SLN 500K postd. ep5	0.571	8.21	+0.003
TR-SLN all-spike postd. ep2	0.641	8.19	+0.073

Full per-axis Pearson ρ (global + local frame) and pipeline notes in docs/COMPARISON.md and docs/scoreboard.csv.

Key empirical findings:

1. Data scale > architecture. Both 500K-subset-trained models (CNN, TR) underperform the MP+DREDge baseline; both all-spike-trained models beat it by +0.07-0.10 ρ̄. Architecture choice within the all-spike regime matters less than dataset coverage.
2. z gets a free implicit gradient through representation drift in the shared encoder layers. The z-row of the final Linear(64→3) receives zero gradient (z is not in the loss), but the shared backbone evolves under the (x,y) loss and changes the encoder features that the frozen z-row reads from. After 10 CNN epochs the shared layers shift ~23% in relative norm, producing noticeably "flatter" z distributions.
3. One outer DREDge iteration is enough. After 20 inner SLN epochs the model's raw outputs are consistent with DREDge1; running DREDge again yields a motion field 99.7% correlated (1.18 μm RMS) with DREDge1. Re-applying it to the same predictions slightly reduces ρ̄ (0.663 → 0.641) because the SLN training tuned residuals to be cancelled by DREDge1 specifically.

Interactive visualizer

src/make_interactive_localization_html.py builds a self-contained, clickable HTML explorer of a trained model's localizations (shown above for the CNN all-spike 2D-loss ep20 model). Layout:

• 6 pairwise scatter panels (top-left) of the per-spike local coordinates (l_x, l_y, l_z) + α, colored by log₁₀α on the canonical Inferno scale.
• 3 global aggregate panels (bottom) — x-y / x-z / z-y in the exact aggregate_projections L-layout, with white channel-square markers.
• A dense background shows the full distribution; 1000 spikes are silently interactive. Clicking any of the 9 panels snaps (pixel-accurate) to the nearest interactive spike and renders, on the right:
  • its 10-channel waveforms at probe locations — raw (blue) + tPCA-denoised (red) — overlaid with four localizers for side-by-side comparison: the SLN estimate (★ pink), the monopolar MP fit (✚ cyan), the max-amplitude / peak-channel estimate (☐ green), and the amplitude-weighted center-of-mass (✕ orange), plus the channel-neighborhood anchor (○);
  • a rotatable 3-D local frame (l_x, l_y, l_z) with the raw + tPCA waveforms laid flat in the z=0 probe plane at their channel positions, the anchor at the origin, and all four localizers in 3-D — SLN ◆ (α-colored) and MP ✚ at their estimated depth (with droplines), max-amp ☐ and CoM ✕ pinned to z=0.

It is method-agnostic: point --gl_pre / --global_dir at any apply output and set --label. A 4-output (CNN4D) model colors by predicted log₁₀α; a 3-output model falls back to the MP monopolar log₁₀α. Plotly is loaded from a CDN; pass --svg (with a small --n_bg) for an SVG render that avoids the browser's WebGL-context limit (used to produce the screenshot above).

python3 src/make_interactive_localization_html.py \
    --gl_pre  <apply_dir>/GL_pre_dredge.npy \
    --global_dir <apply_dir> \
    --label "CNN all-spike 2D-loss ep20" \
    --out figures/interactive_localization_cnn_all_2d_ep20.html
# then open the HTML in any browser

How to use this code

Dependencies

See requirements.txt. Core: PyTorch ≥ 2.1, spikeinterface ≥ 0.103, numpy, matplotlib, tqdm. Tested on Apple Silicon (MPS) and CPU; CUDA should work but is untested in this repo.

Reproducing a final-method viz package

This repo does NOT ship the raw recordings or intermediate .npy arrays (per-spike waveforms, localizations, anchors — these are GBs each). You'll need:

1. Raw data — Neuropixels recording (e.g. data/dataset1/)
2. Detection + waveform extraction — produce spike_times.npy, spike_channels.npy, spike_amplitudes.npy, spike_anchors.npy, waveforms_all.npy, channel_locations.npy, fs.npy. (Use your favorite spike sorter's output for spike times + amplitudes; channel anchors are neighborhood centroids of the 10 nearest channels.)
3. Monopolar localization — produce spike_locs_{x,y,z,alpha}.npy. We used the SI implementation.
4. Pretrain CNN/TR — python src/train_relative_xyz_model.py --dataset_dir <...> or analogous for the Transformer
5. Joint training — python src/train_sln_dredge_iterative.py ... (outer loop with periodic DREDge) OR python src/train_sln_postdredge.py ... (frozen motion after a single DREDge round)
6. Apply to all spikes — python src/apply_sln_to_all_spikes.py ...
7. Generate the viz package — one make_*.py script per visualization (see the file list in the layout above)

For movies (skipped from this repo), regenerate via:

python src/make_localization_movie.py \
    --x_path <method>/x.npy --y_path <method>/y.npy --z_path <method>/z.npy \
    --corr_matrix_path xy_pairwise_corr_<method>.npy \
    --entropy_path spatial_entropy_<method>.npy \
    --motion_path <method>/motion.npz \
    --label "<method label>" --color "#..." \
    --frames_dir figures/localization_movie_<method>_frames \
    --out figures/localization_movie_<method>.mp4

For trained model checkpoints (skipped from this repo): contact the authors or rerun the training pipeline from a pretrained CNN.

Citation / paper

The method is described in a NeurIPS 2026 paper (in preparation). Citation TBD upon acceptance.

License

See LICENSE (MIT).