Hadi Vafaii
@hadivafaii.bsky.social
๐ค 845
๐ฅ 175
๐ 121
Postdoc at UC Berkeley, Redwood Center | ๐ง ๐ค | ๐น | ๐พ |
https://mysterioustune.com/
pinned post!
Elegant theoretical derivations are exclusive to physics. Right?? Wrong! In a new preprint, we: โ "Derive" a spiking recurrent network from variational principles โ Show it does amazing things like out-of-distribution generalization ๐[1/n]๐งต w/ co-lead Dekel Galor & PI
@jcbyts.bsky.social
๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
4 months ago
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Now accepted to
#NeurIPS2025
- see y'all in sunny San Diego โ๏ธ Also, big thanks to our reviewers. Their deep reading of the paper and thoughtful feedback really helped sharpen our contributions. Stay tuned for a much-enhanced final version in a couple weeks!
add a skeleton here at some point
4 days ago
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reposted by
Hadi Vafaii
Grace
5 days ago
Very good juxtaposition
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What drives behavior in living organisms? And how can we design artificial agents that learn interactively? ๐ข To address these, the Sensorimotor AI Journal Club is launching the "RL Debate Series"๐ w/
@elisennesh.bsky.social
,
@noreward4u.bsky.social
,
@tommasosalvatori.bsky.social
๐งต[1/5] ๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
5 days ago
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In the second meeting of 'Sensorimotor AI Journal Club' we covered: ๐ (B)ayesian (O)nline learning in (N)on-stationary (E)nvironments (BONE;
openreview.net/forum?id=ose...
) Many thanks to the first author Gerardo for an amazing presentation! ๐ฅ watch it here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=49PP...
๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
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Bayesian online learning in non-stationary environments (BONE) by Duran-Martin et al., 2025
YouTube video by Sensorimotor AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49PPmv9IK0E
17 days ago
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reposted by
Hadi Vafaii
Eli Sennesh
23 days ago
Had a great time visiting Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience!
archive.org/details/Redw...
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Eli Sennesh: Oscillations, but not Spike Rates, Encode Predictive Processing : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Talk by Eli Sennesh of Vanderbilt University.ย Given to the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley.Abstract: The appearance at the...
https://archive.org/details/Redwood_Center_2025_08_29_Eli_Sennesh
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Our first 'Sensorimotor AI Journal Club' meeting was a blast! (...which, we might as well just call the "AI Club for Non-conformists"๐๐) ๐ฝ๏ธ full presentation:
youtube.com/watch?v=efc7...
๐งต[1/4] ๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
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about 1 month ago
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reposted by
Hadi Vafaii
Eli Sennesh
about 1 month ago
Thanks to
@hadivafaii.bsky.social
for presenting at our very first Sensorimotor AI Journal Club!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=efc7...
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Bayesian Online Natural Gradient (BONG) by Jones et al., 2024 โ Sensorimotor AI Journal Club
YouTube video by Sensorimotor AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efc70z3bGlc
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Announcing the new "Sensorimotor AI" Journal Club โ please share/repost! w/ Kaylene Stocking, Tommaso Salvatori, and
@elisennesh.bsky.social
Sign up link:
forms.gle/o5DXD4WMdhTg...
More details below ๐งต[1/5] ๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
2 months ago
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โPerception as Inferenceโ is a century-old idea that has inspired all major theories in neuroscience ๐ง , including: โ Sparse Coding โ Predictive Coding โ Free Energy Principle & more! In my new blog post, I build the intuition behind this idea from ground up ๐[1/6]๐งต ๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
3 months ago
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Elegant theoretical derivations are exclusive to physics. Right?? Wrong! In a new preprint, we: โ "Derive" a spiking recurrent network from variational principles โ Show it does amazing things like out-of-distribution generalization ๐[1/n]๐งต w/ co-lead Dekel Galor & PI
@jcbyts.bsky.social
๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
4 months ago
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Every living system must adapt, or die. In my first blog post, I show how this fundamental principle can be mathematized: โ Brains adapt, and adaptation is about KL divergence minimization. Let's unpack the main insights ๐งต[1/n] Link:
mysterioustune.com/2025/01/13/w...
๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
#AI
8 months ago
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reposted by
Hadi Vafaii
Ricard Solรฉ
9 months ago
Is there an arrow of time in the brain? Can Boltzmann and Shannon's ideas be used to understand it? Check this paper by Morten Kringelbach, J Perl and Gustavo Deco on how physics and information theory reveal how hierarchical cognition works
cell.com/trends/cogni...
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"Probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially as nobody has the slightest notion what it means." โBertrand Russell, 1929 "Probability does not exist." โBruno de Finetti, 1974
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
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Why probability probably doesnโt exist (but it is useful to act like it does)
All of statistics and much of science depends on probability โ an astonishing achievement, considering no oneโs really sure what it is.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04096-5
9 months ago
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Thank you for capturing this moment. Visa issues can make it difficult, but they won't stop the flow of ideas!
add a skeleton here at some point
9 months ago
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To my Bluesky friends attending
#NeurIPS2024
: Check out our poster: โPoisson Variational Autoencoderโ (P-VAE)! The P-VAE is a
#generative
model that encodes inputs into spike count variables and unifies major neuroscience theories with modern machine learning. w/ Jacob Yates and Dekel Galor ๐ง ๐ค๐ง ๐
10 months ago
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I started a blog to write about what I truly care about: the relationship between physics, brains, intelligence, perception, and reality. Hereโs my "Hello World" post:
mysterioustune.com
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10 months ago
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Beautiful thread! I extracted my personal favorites:
add a skeleton here at some point
10 months ago
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reposted by
Hadi Vafaii
PessoaBrain
over 1 year ago
Building on amazing development of simultaneous Ca2+ optical imaging and fMRI-BOLD by Evelyn Lake, Todd Constable and Yale team, we investigated correspondence or lack thereof of large-scale cortical systems by considering overlapping networks. Check thread below. Part of Hadi's tireless PhD work!
add a skeleton here at some point
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Ever wondered how closely fMRI brain networks reflect a neural underpinningโ We address this using simultaneous fMRI & widefield Caยฒโบ imaging in mice, and the answer isโฆ complicated! ๐๐งต[1/n] Jointly supervised by Evelyn Lake &
@pessoabrain.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
over 1 year ago
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