Scale-mixture Langevin sampling in the subspaces of recurrent cortical circuit dynamics

Abstract Recurrent cortical circuits are hypothesized to perform Bayesian posterior sampling through their stochastic dynamics. Yet identifying which sampling algorithm a circuit intrinsically implements, as opposed to mapping manually designing algorithms onto circuits, requires rigorous theoretical analysis of the biological circuit dynamics, and remains a fundamental open challenge because of the analytical intractability of nonlinear recurrent dynamics. Here, we tackle this challenge through comprehensive theoretical analysis of analytically tractable nonlinear recurrent circuit dynamics used in neuroscience research— the continuous attractor network (CAN). Surprisingly, we find that the circuit, without any non-Gaussian components in its connectivity or internal variability, intrinsically emerges heavy-tailed subspaces dynamics described as scale-mixture Langevin posterior sampling. The mechanism emerges from the circuit’s own nonlinear dynamics: divisive normalization renders the overall population activation Gamma-distributed which multiplicatively modulates the time constant of the Langevin sampling in the stimulus feature subspace. Eventually, this scale-mixture structure produces a heavy-tailed (Student- t ) sampling step size distribution, significantly accelerating the sampling speed. Moreover, the scale-mixture Langevin sampling approaches a Lévy-like regime in the weak input limit. Our results analytically identify an intrinsic circuit algorithm embedded in subspaces of nonlinear recurrent dynamics, and establish a minimal circuit mechanism for endogenous heavy-tail statistics without any explicit non-Gaussian components.