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

The mathematician Fan Chung has authored over 300 papers with more than 150 coauthors. Her work has contributed to problems in computer science, engineering and physics. In an interview with Quanta, Chung discusses human and mathematical connection: www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-key-...

Pleased to announce that our paper on "Identifying Neural Dynamics Using Interventional State Space Models" has been selected for a poster presentation in #ICML2025. Please check the thread for paper details (0/n). Presentation info: icml.cc/virtual/2025....

Excited to share new work @icmlconf.bsky.social by Loek van Rossem exploring the development of computational algorithms in recurrent neural networks. Hear it live tomorrow, Oral 1D, Tues 15 Jul West Exhibition Hall C: icml.cc/virtual/2025... Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=3go... (1/11)

Brain-wide connectivity patterns of feedforward and feedback cortico-cortical neurons in the mouse secondary visual cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.08.663552v1

Excited to announce the Foundation Models for the Brain and Body workshop at #NeurIPS2025! 🧠📈 🧪 We invite short papers or interactive demos on AI for neural, physiological or behavioral data. Submit by Aug 22 👉 brainbodyfm-workshop.github.io

Can your AI beat a mouse? Mice still outperform our best computing machines in some ways. One way is robust visual processing. 10 years ago I decided to work on HARD behavior driven by COMPLEX visual processing. And that risk is paying off now. #neuroAI 1/n

In this “Brain Inspired” episode, Paul Middlebrooks and Xiao-Jing Wang discuss how neuroscience has changed over the past 50 years, and how Wang believes modern theoretical tools will lead to a new era of “cross-levels mechanistic understanding.” Listen now: www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

Pleased to say that our story of how a theory of self-supervised learning in cortical layers accounts for several experimental observations is now out 🎉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Different representations in layer 2/3 and layer 5 excitatory neurons of the primary visual cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.30.662366v1

🧠🤖 We’re hiring a Postdoc in NeuroAI! Join CRC1233 "Robust Vision" (Uni Tübingen) to build benchmarks & evaluation methods for vision models, bridging brain & AI. Work with top faculty & shape vision research. Apply: tinyurl.com/3jtb4an6 #NeuroAI #Jobs

Here is your last reminder that the application deadline for Imbizo.Africa is nearing quickly, the 1st of July, in fact tomorrow. Still the place where diversity is at its best in the world! Tell all who need to hear. #africa #neuro

Lack of spontaneous activity (#retinalwaves) in early development prevents the formation of retinal circuits critical for stabilizing images as we move through the world. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce....

🧠 Can a neural network build a spatial map from scattered episodic experiences like humans do? We introduce the Episodic Spatial World Model (ESWM)—a model that constructs flexible internal world models from sparse, disjoint memories. 🧵👇 [1/12]