Hi all! My lab at the University of Bern @unibe.ch 🇨🇭, funded by @snsf.ch, opening in April 2026, is looking for candidates for several fully-funded positions: a postdoctoral scientist, PhD student(s) and a laboratory technician. Please share (and apply)!

Why don’t neural networks learn all at once, but instead progress from simple to complex solutions? And what does “simple” even mean across different neural network architectures? Sharing our new paper @iclr_conf led by Yedi Zhang with Peter Latham arxiv.org/abs/2512.20607

A functional influence based circuit motif that constrains the set of plausible algorithms of cortical function https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.29.702557v1

Apply to work with Jeff. You'll enjoy great science and collaboration with a caring PI.

Hierarchical processing and polarization encoding in the cephalopod visual system https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.08.698312v1

I will be presenting part of this work in workshop on Interpreting Cognition in Deep Learning Models, CogInterp Unifying Gestalt Principles Through Inference-Time Prior Integration Dec 7th, Room 5AB #NeurIPS2025 @neuripsconf.bsky.social Also, some cool papers!👇 coginterp.github.io/neurips2025/...

Please help me find the answer to this question by reposting or tagging people who might know. What is a proper #?

I guess it’s now well established that locomotion boosts the signal-to-noise ratio of visual cortical responses in mice. Is there any evidence that locomotion also enhances visual recognition performance at the behavioral level?

I am impressed by the improvement with Gemini 3 and nano 🍌. I used nano banana to make scientific figures. With 2.5 it was repetitively putting a human brain inside the 🐭 head. Now it draws an accurate mouse brain anatomy even seems to locate correctly the cortical areas. Big jump imo

Response dynamics in macaque ventral stream recapitulate the visual hierarchy https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.11.686115v1

Our lab is looking for a postdoc! We have interesting projects and cutting-edge techniques such as Neuropixels Opto, Light Beads Microscopy and more. We would be delighted to receive your application. Deadline is 25 November 2025. More info here: www.ucl.ac.uk/cortexlab/po...

Project structure for scientific coding projects - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series open.substack.com/pub/russpold...

I’m looking for interns to join our lab for a project on foundation models in neuroscience. Funded by @ivado.bsky.social and in collaboration with the IVADO regroupement 1 (AI and Neuroscience: ivado.ca/en/regroupem...). Interested? See the details in the comments. (1/3) 🧠🤖

How does our brain excel at complex object recognition, yet get fooled by simple illusory contours? What unifying principle governs all Gestalt laws of perceptual organization? We may have an answer: integration of learned priors through feedback. New paper with @kenmiller.bsky.social! 🧵

New faculty job opening at @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @columbiauniversity.bsky.social Come be our colleague! Application deadline: November 22 apply.interfolio.com/176153

Today in Nature Machine Intelligence, Kazuki Irie & I discuss 4 classic challenges for neural nets — systematic generalization, catastrophic forgetting, few-shot learning, & reasoning. We argue there is a unifying fix: the right incentives & practice. rdcu.be/eLRmg

Next week, our usual weekly predictive processing meeting will be a journal club. Hyeyoung Shin will present our recent shared publication: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Note the different time: Oct 20 at 4PM PST, meeting details : allenneuraldynamics.github.io/openscope-co... Open to All!

Map of spiking activity underlying change detection in the mouse visual system https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.17.683190v1

Vision people: what's the best encoding model for V4? I know brainscore has a ranking of trained models, but do we know what best captures tuning to orientation, spatial frequency, and color? Is there a "bank of filters" model that's better than trained ones? #neuroskyence

A study led by Cina Aghamohammadi is now out in ‪@natcomms.nature.com‬! We developed a mathematical framework for partitioning spiking variability, which revealed that spiking irregularity is nearly invariant for each neuron and decreases along the cortical hierarchy. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Distributed neural computation and the evolution of the first brains https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.03.680388v1

Tomorrow , we will host a public presentation from Farzaneh Najafi on her lab recent publication on temporal predictive processing : allenneuraldynamics.github.io/openscope-co... All are welcome to join at 10AM PST time. The Microsoft team link is in the meeting link.

If you're interested in doing your PhD with us, please apply via the ELLIS PhD program! We're looking for talented people interested in the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience.

Super cool data and analysis!

🚨 New preprint alert! 🧠🤖 We propose a theory of how learning curriculum affects generalization through neural population dimensionality. Learning curriculum is a determining factor of neural dimensionality - where you start from determines where you end up. 🧠📈 A 🧵: tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3

Very much look forward to our workshop (co-organized with @armanbehrad.bsky.social) today with a great lineup of speakers who combine a wide spectrum of approaches and methods to have a joint definition of brain-behavior state! bernstein-network.de/bernstein-co... #BernsteinConference

Apply to Laureline's lab! Amazing science, awesome mentor.

Exciting news! 🎉 Our Computational Neuroscience course has been awarded NIH BRAIN Initiative funding! Students will get hands-on experience w real BRAIN Initiative datasets, helping them build computational skills that are essential for the future of neuroscience. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

This is one of my favourite things ever. From the awesome @kristorpjensen.bsky.social

At Neurips? You can now check out @herrickfung.bsky.social ‘s new work on modeling individual differences at two workshops! Much more to say on this awesome colab with @dobyrahnev.bsky.social very soon. 🙂

New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/

🚨Our NeurIPS 2025 competition Mouse vs. AI is LIVE! We combine a visual navigation task + large-scale mouse neural data to test what makes visual RL agents robust and brain-like. Top teams: featured at NeurIPS + co-author our summary paper. Join the challenge! Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446

New work from the lab, mismatch responses consistent with spatial but not temporal predictive coding theory.

Please RT - Open PhD position in my group at the Donders Center for Neuroscience, Radboud University. We're looking for a PhD candidate interested in developing theories of learning in neural networks. Applications are open until October 20th. For more info: www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Excited to highlight a new paper from my graduate student Sergio Bernal Garcia who, together withLuke Hammond, developed RESPAN, a new deep-learning pipeline automating the segmentation of neuronal morphology and dendritic spines from fluorescent microscopy images: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Thrilled to see this work accepted at NeurIPS! Kudos to @hafezghm.bsky.social for the heroic effort in demonstrating the efficacy of seq-JEPA in representation learning from multiple angles. #MLSky 🧠🤖

And we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...

Do you see a white square? A new study, supported by our #OpenScope team, identified the key neural circuit and cell type involved with inferring details that don't exist in illusions like the one below. 🔗 alleninstitute.org/news/scienti... #OpenScienceWeek

(1/8) New paper from our team! Yu Duan & Hamza Chaudhry introduce POCO, a tool for predicting brain activity at the cellular & network level during spontaneous behavior. Find out how we built POCO & how it changes neurobehavioral research 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2506.14957

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today! A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour www.nature.com/articles/s41... Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New work with @shiyanliang.bsky.social‬, @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social, @intlbrainlab.bsky.social, Anna Levina. We uncover the principles that organize single-neuron timescales across the entire brain, unifying regional specialization with universal brain-wide dynamics: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

An overview of persona vectors in LLMs, and related context. youtu.be/SkP71SaoOrg?...

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(16/26) This leads to a dynamic analog of Hopfield networks: rather than evoking static patterns by aligning inputs to symmetric-connectivity eigenstructure, we evoke dynamic patterns by aligning inputs to asymmetric-connectivity eigenstructure.

ATTN🚨: I will be looking for PhD students through NYU's Center for Data Science PhD program this year. Applicants should have an interest in either NeuroAI (specifically biological attention or AI interpretability) or ML for Remote Sensing. Visit my lab website for more info: lindsay-lab.github.io

Wanted to share a new version (much cleaner!) of a preprint on how connectivity structure shapes collective dynamics in nonlinear RNNs. Neural circuits have highly non-iid connectivity (e.g., rapidly decaying singular values, structured singular-vector overlaps), unlike classical random RNN models.

New theory: Categorization is Baked Into the Brain Categorization is not a late stage of sensory processing but a core computation that begins at the earliest stages, occurring throughout the cortex as predictive feedback shapes feedforward processing. doi.org/10.31234/osf... #neuroscience

Are similar representations in neural nets evidence of shared computation? In new theory work w/ Lukas Braun (lukasbraun.com) & @saxelab.bsky.social, we prove that representational comparisons are ill-posed in general, unless networks are efficient. @icmlconf.bsky.social @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

Questions for an updated Turing test.

Feature-specific inhibitory connectivity augments the accuracy of cortical representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.02.668307v1