From labels to latents: revealing state-dependent hippocampal computations with Jump Latent Variable Model

Neural activity is usually interpreted by imposing external labels (e.g., stimuli or position during locomotion) and decoding within that space (e.g. replay). While powerful, such supervision can mask structure in the data that do not correspond to the label. Unsupervised methods, in turn, often assume smooth latent dynamics and miss genuine discontinuities. We introduce a conceptually simple, computationally efficient latent variable model that infers both (i) the latent variables organizing population activity and (ii) whether their dynamics are continuous or fragmented in time. Fitting reduces to an expectation-maximization (EM) procedure that alternates two operations familiar to systems neuroscience--tuning-curve estimation and label decoding--without requiring external labels. Applied to rodent hippocampal spike recordings, the model reveals distinct population patterns at the same physical position that supervised spatial decoding fails to detect. While learned latents exhibit place-field-like tuning, their reactivation patterns are better distinguished by behavioral states. The model further identifies a continuity-fragmentation axis that characterizes population activities across sleep-wake brain states that is modulated by cholinergic inputs. By not relying on externally imposed spatial labels, our approach exposes structure that supervised approaches obscure and provides a powerful tool for datasets lacking behavioral tracking.