A low-dimensional, generalizable encoding manifold for auditory cortex

Neural populations in auditory cortex (AC) perform sensory computations that support stimulus category decoding and flexible behavior. The underlying geometry and generalizability of these computations for natural stimuli remain poorly understood, particularly at the single-neuron level, where neurons display wide-ranging tuning specificity and temporal acuity. To address this gap, we developed ACNet, a foundation model of cortical sound encoding, to predict the time-varying activity of >3000 neurons in AC of ferrets. Training data included 42 hours of natural sounds spanning over 100 categories and were collected from multiple recording sites across multiple animals. The model achieved state-of-the-art response prediction accuracy. Model activity was succinctly captured by a low-dimensional neural manifold, which generalized (>80% of variance) across animals. Analysis of ACNet activations revealed the emergence of rate-based, sparse sound coding across layers, a prominent feature of the auditory cortex. These transformations were concomitant with the emergence of more accurate and neurally aligned auditory category decoding, even though ACNet was not explicitly trained to categorize sounds. The model also revealed tuning differences between anatomically distinct cell types. Taken together, our results demonstrate that foundation models of sensory systems can reveal generalizable computations by large neural populations.