PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Birgit Kriener AU - Rishidev Chaudhuri AU - Ila R. Fiete TI - Robust parallel decision-making in neural circuits with nonlinear inhibition AID - 10.1101/231753 DP - 2019 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 231753 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/09/231753.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/09/231753.full AB - Identifying the maximal element (max,argmax) in a set is a core computational element in inference, decision making, optimization, action selection, consensus, and foraging. Running sequentially through a list of N fluctuating items takes N log(N) time to accurately find the max, prohibitively slow for large N. The power of computation in the brain is ascribed in part to its parallelism, yet it is theoretically unclear whether leaky and noisy neurons can perform a distributed computation that cuts the required time of a serial computation by a factor of N, a benchmark for parallel computation. We show that conventional winner-take-all neural networks fail the parallelism benchmark and in the presence of noise altogether fail to produce a winner when N is large. We introduce the nWTA network, in which neurons are equipped with a second nonlinearity that prevents weakly active neurons from contributing inhibition. Without parameter fine-tuning or re-scaling as the number of options N varies, the nWTA network converges N times faster than the serial strategy at equal accuracy, saturating the parallelism benchmark. The nWTA network self-adjusts integration time with task difficulty to maintain fixed accuracy without parameter change. Finally, the circuit generically exhibits Hick's law for decision speed. Our work establishes that distributed computation that saturates the parallelism benchmark is possible in networks of noisy, finite-memory neurons.