Enough #Bayesplaining. It's time to start "deriving." We're unifying physics and neuroscience from first principles (yes, really). Come argue with me tomorrow @ 11 AM. @neuripsconf.bsky.social 🧠🤖🧠📈

I will be at @neuripsconf.bsky.social Dec 2-8 to present our "Brain-like Variational Inference" paper 👇 Let's connect if you enjoy first-principles thinking and brain-inspired AI 🧠 🤖 Poster info: 📅 Wed, Dec 3, 11 AM — 2 PM 📍Exhibit Hall C,D,E #500 🔗 neurips.cc/virtual/2025... 🧵[1/4] 🧠🤖🧠📈

Thanks @hadivafaii.bsky.social for the invitation! x.com/hadivafaii/s...

Stop treating neurons as passive processors... They are active controllers! 🧠 🎮 In our latest Journal Club session, Thelonious Cooper presented "The neuron as a direct data-driven controller" by Moore et al., with special commentary from Mitya Chklovskii. 🎥 www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P7k... 🧠🤖🧠📈

RL Debates 5: Anne "not everything is RL" Collins Anne delivered an amazing synthesis of her extensive work on how working memory shapes reward-based learning in humans. 📜 Read the paper: nature.com/articles/s41... 📽️ Watch the full presentation: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEqZ... 🧠🤖🧠📈

RL Debates 4: Adam "I literally measured value in the brain" Lowet Adam's talk covered a lot of ground — from his recent work on distributional RL (nature.com/articles/s41...) to a broader discussion of RL & the brain. 📽️ Watch the full meeting here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe7B... 🧠🤖🧠📈

Picked this one up for reading over the holidays. “The thesis of this book is that the dominant ideas that have shaped #neuroscience are best understood as attempts to simplify the brain.” 🧠 …which is itself a simplification 😂

RL Debates 3: Niels "you have 1000 brains in your brain" Leadholm See how Monty (a cortex-inspired model), crushes powerful ViTs in out-of-distribution & continual learning tasks—all while being millions of times more efficient in data & FLOPs! 📽️ Watch here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0FF... 🧠🤖🧠📈

RL Debates 2: Fritz "learning for the sake of learning" Sommer Fritz introduced an information-theoretic, first-principles approach to modeling exploration through the maximization of "predicted information gain." 📽️ Watch the full presentation here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlF-... 🧠🤖🧠📈

A new user influx - welcome! A great nudge to pass this around. (Psst: Scientist authors tend to have fascinating Bsky feeds). go.bsky.app/2LmKSDN

We started our RL debate series! www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0A0...

Wonderful to see this high-level conversation about reinforcement learning happen not just “at the top” but across many professional levels (including trainees). 👏👏👏 to everyone involved. Such a thoughtful way to expedite progress. I look forward to following along.

I'm excited to announce that we've added two more contenders to the RL Debate Series! - Anne Collins (Professor @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social) - Niels Leadholm (Research Manager @thousandbrains.org) Things are heating up!! See the flyer for details👇 🌎 sensorimotorai.github.io/debates/ 🧠🤖🧠📈

The first meeting of the 'RL Debate Series' is now on YouTube! Watch @elisennesh.bsky.social abolish the value function: youtube.com/watch?v=E0A0... 🧠🤖🧠📈

The brain is incredibly densely connected. Human cerebral cortex may have as many as *one trillion* connections. Most of those cortical connections are recurrent, inside each area. What do they do? New paper from me in Annual Reviews: 🧪 🧠📈 1/ www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Thanks to @pessoabrain.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social for featuring our paper and to @aliyarumana.bsky.social and Peter Tse for engaging so generously with the ideas! 😊 www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

Now accepted to #NeurIPS2025 - see y'all in sunny San Diego ☀️ 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!

Very good juxtaposition

What drives behavior in living organisms? And how can we design artificial agents that learn interactively? 📢 To address these, the Sensorimotor AI Journal Club is launching the "RL Debate Series"👇 w/ @elisennesh.bsky.social, @noreward4u.bsky.social, @tommasosalvatori.bsky.social 🧵[1/5] 🧠🤖🧠📈

In the second meeting of 'Sensorimotor AI Journal Club' we covered: 📜 (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! 🎥 watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=49PP... 🧠🤖🧠📈

Had a great time visiting Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience! archive.org/details/Redw...

Our first 'Sensorimotor AI Journal Club' meeting was a blast! (...which, we might as well just call the "AI Club for Non-conformists"👇😎) 📽️ full presentation: youtube.com/watch?v=efc7... 🧵[1/4] 🧠🤖🧠📈

Thanks to @hadivafaii.bsky.social for presenting at our very first Sensorimotor AI Journal Club! www.youtube.com/watch?v=efc7...

Announcing the new "Sensorimotor AI" Journal Club — please share/repost! w/ Kaylene Stocking, Tommaso Salvatori, and @elisennesh.bsky.social Sign up link: forms.gle/o5DXD4WMdhTg... More details below 🧵[1/5] 🧠🤖🧠📈

“Perception as Inference” is a century-old idea that has inspired all major theories in neuroscience 🧠, including: ✅ Sparse Coding ✅ Predictive Coding ✅ Free Energy Principle & more! In my new blog post, I build the intuition behind this idea from ground up 👉[1/6]🧵 🧠🤖🧠📈

Elegant theoretical derivations are exclusive to physics. Right?? Wrong! In a new preprint, we: ✅ "Derive" a spiking recurrent network from variational principles ✅ Show it does amazing things like out-of-distribution generalization 👉[1/n]🧵 w/ co-lead Dekel Galor & PI @jcbyts.bsky.social 🧠🤖🧠📈

Every living system must adapt, or die. In my first blog post, I show how this fundamental principle can be mathematized: ✅ Brains adapt, and adaptation is about KL divergence minimization. Let's unpack the main insights 🧵[1/n] Link: mysterioustune.com/2025/01/13/w... 🧠🤖🧠📈 #AI

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...

"Probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially as nobody has the slightest notion what it means." —Bertrand Russell, 1929 "Probability does not exist." —Bruno de Finetti, 1974 www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧠🤖🧠📈

Thank you for capturing this moment. Visa issues can make it difficult, but they won't stop the flow of ideas!

To my Bluesky friends attending #NeurIPS2024: Check out our poster: “Poisson Variational Autoencoder” (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 🧠🤖🧠📈

I started a blog to write about what I truly care about: the relationship between physics, brains, intelligence, perception, and reality. Here’s my "Hello World" post: mysterioustune.com 🧠🤖🧠📈

Beautiful thread! I extracted my personal favorites:

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!

Ever wondered how closely fMRI brain networks reflect a neural underpinning❓ We address this using simultaneous fMRI & widefield Ca²⁺ imaging in mice, and the answer is… complicated! 👉🧵[1/n] Jointly supervised by Evelyn Lake & @pessoabrain.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...