Robust motifs of threshold-linear networks

Abstract: To any inhibition-dominated threshold-linear network (TLN) we can associate a directed graph that captures the pattern of strong and weak inhibition between neurons. Robust motifs are graphs for which the structure of fixed points in the network is independent of the choice of connectivity matrix $W$, and whose dynamics are thus greatly constrained. This makes them ideal building blocks for constructing larger networks whose behaviors are robust to changes in connection strengths. In contrast, flexible motifs correspond to networks with multiple dynamic regimes. In this work, we give a purely graphical characterization of both flexible and robust motifs of any size. We find that all but a few robust motifs fall into two infinite families of graphs with simple feedforward architectures.