Learning Hybrid Biophysical Neuron Models with Neural ODEs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16693v1
• Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:29:41 GMT
• Title: Learning Hybrid Biophysical Neuron Models with Neural ODEs
• Abstract summary: We introduce a hybrid modeling framework that embeds neural ordinary differential equations into conductance-based biophysical models.<n>We show that the hybrid model fits the gating kinetics of 2400 ion channel models and recovers unknown gating dynamics from single current-clamp recordings.
• Score: 20.563327252400953
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Biophysical neuron models link measurements of neural activity to underlying cellular mechanisms. Yet, a central challenge is that the kinetics of many ion channels are poorly characterized, and practical simplifications -- omitting channels or reducing morphological detail -- introduce systematic gaps between model and biology. Bridging these gaps requires approaches that can flexibly discover unmodeled dynamics while preserving mechanistic interpretability. Here, we introduce a hybrid modeling framework that embeds neural ordinary differential equations into conductance-based biophysical models to capture unknown currents or mis-specified channel kinetics. By parameterizing the neural ODE in terms of voltage-dependent steady-state and time-constant functions, we recover interpretable gating dynamics directly from voltage recordings without assuming a functional form. We show that the hybrid model fits the gating kinetics of 2400 ion channel models and recovers unknown gating dynamics from single current-clamp recordings, generalizing to out-of-distribution stimulus regimes under realistic inputs and parameter misspecification. We also use our method to reduce a multicompartment model of a cortical neuron into a single-compartment hybrid model with a learned axial current, yielding up to an order of magnitude lower computational cost. Together, our results establish a plug-and-play framework for selectively replacing unknown components of conductance-based models with neural ODEs while preserving their mechanistic structure.

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