Neural population geometry and optimal coding of tasks with shared latent structure

Abstract Animals can recognize latent structures in their environment and apply this information to efficiently navigate the world. Several works argue that the brain supports these abilities by forming neural representations from which behaviorally relevant variables can be read out across contexts and tasks. However, it is unclear which features of neural activity facilitate downstream readout. Here we analytically determine the geometric properties of neural activity that govern linear readout generalization on a set of tasks sharing a common latent structure. We show that four statistics summarizing the dimensionality, factorization and correlation structures of neural activity determine generalization. Early in learning, optimal neural representations are lower dimensional and exhibit higher correlations between single units and task variables than late in learning. We support these predictions through biological and artificial neural data analysis. Our results tie the linearly decodable information in neural population activity to its geometry.