Two simple ideas for building improved brain encoding models: 1. learn to use representations from all model layers via a gating mechanism + 2. start from natively multimodal features for multimodal predictions. State of the art performance; see mirage-brain.epfl.ch for details #NeuroAI 🧠🤖🧪

🧠 When you watch a movie, your brain blends sight, sound, and speech into a single experience. Should models of the brain blend them too, or keep the senses separate until the very end? We built MIRAGE to find out. It sets a new SOTA for predicting whole-brain fMRI from movies. 🧵

Crossed 1,000 citations on Google Scholar today, with an h-index of 15 🎈 What felt like a distant goal a few years ago is now real, and I'm especially proud that the bulk of it is carried by my first-author papers. On to the next milestone!

Good morning #ICLR2026 ☀️ The Re-Align workshop kicks off in under an hour! A full day on what we can actually do with representational alignment, from brains to language models to agents. Schedule in the thread 👇

Excited to be in Rio for #ICLR2026 🇧🇷 I'll be presenting our work, Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners (aka MiCRo), on Friday at Pavilion 3, 10:30 AM (#1610). Come say hi :D Happy to chat about NeuroAI, representational & cultural alignment, and/or test-time learning 🧠

The current direction of AI labs is “we’re building something that’s going to replace you and we have no plan to make sure you’re going to land in a better place, but we’ll make billions.” The logical reaction is, “shut it down.” Labs need to get serious on addressing labor impacts.

Had the pleasure of being an invited speaker at the KAUST Rising Stars in AI Symposium last week. Inspiring to meet such a talented group of fellow rising stars and learn about their exciting work. Thanks to the KAUST team for a wonderful event!

🚀 The Re-Align Challenge is now LIVE! We’re inviting you to explore what properties of vision models and data lead to convergences and divergences in representational alignment. 🔗 Get started: huggingface.co/spaces/repre... 🧵👇

Happy to share that our paper “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners: Modular Reasoning with Brain-Like Specialization” (aka MiCRo) has been accepted to #ICLR2026!! 🎉 See you in Rio 🇧🇷 🏝️

Three years ago, I built a website called Egyptians in AI Research. Today, that project has grown into Egyptian Researchers in Computer Science thanks to the help of @mo-mo2025.bsky.social! I wrote a blog post on how it grew, and why it expanded beyond AI. 🔗 egyptians-in-cs.github.io 🧵👇

Great to see our "From Language to Cognition" work featured in @mordecwhy.bsky.social's latest piece on language models and the brain. Glad to contribute to the conversation! www.foommagazine.org/language-mod...

Missed the Re-Align hackathon at ICLR or CCN 2025 — or want more? 🙂 Re-Align is back at ICLR 2026 🚀 Beyond the paper track, we’re launching a persistent shared-task challenge + challenge paper track. Can’t wait to see your creative & critical takes on representational alignment 🔥🥳

🎉 Re-Align is back for its 4th edition at ICLR 2026! 📣 We invite submissions on representational alignment, spanning ML, Neuroscience, CogSci, and related fields. 📝 Tracks: Short (≤5p), Long (≤10p), Challenge (blog) ⏰ Deadline: Feb 5, 2026 for papers 🔗 representational-alignment.github.io/2026/

This year was hard, personally and globally, from ongoing visa issues that disrupted my life and may prevent me from achieving one of my dreams, to the state of the world itself. Still grateful for what I achieved and for everyone who supported me. Wishing us all a brighter year ahead. ✨

1/ 🌍 How does mixing data from hundreds of languages affect LLM training? In our new paper "Revisiting Multilingual Data Mixtures in Language Model Pretraining" we revisit core assumptions about multilinguality using 1.1B-3B models trained on up to 400 languages. 🧵👇

Looking forward to be speaking at IndabaX Sudan on Building Responsible and Ethical LLMs! 📅 Saturday, December 13th ⏰ 2:00 PM (GMT+2) Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... See you all there! :)

Not attending NeurIPS this year, but very much looking to connect. I’m seeking a PhD research internship next summer in AI for Science, especially where AI meets brain and cognitive sciences. 🧠 If you’re hiring, I’d love to connect! bkhmsi.github.io

I finally found time to update the Egyptians in AI Research website, apologies for the delay! Super excited to share that we now feature 227 incredible Egyptian researchers!! 🤯 Link: bkhmsi.github.io/egyptians-in...

On my way to #EMNLP2025 🇨🇳 I’ll be presenting our work (Oral) on Nov 5, Special Theme session, Room A106-107 at 14:30. Let’s talk brains 🧠, machines 🤖, and everything in between :D Looking forward to all the amazing discussions!

🚀 Excited to share a major update to our “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners” (MiCRo) paper! We ask: What benefits can we unlock by designing language models whose inner structure mirrors the brain’s functional specialization? More below 🧠👇 cognitive-reasoners.epfl.ch

Excited to be part of this cool work led by Melika Honarmand! We show that by selectively targeting VLM units that mirror the brain’s visual word form area, models develop dyslexic-like reading impairments, while leaving other abilities intact!! 🧠🤖 Details in the 🧵👇

Now that the ICLR deadline is behind us, happy to share that From Language to Cognition has been accepted as an Oral at #EMNLP2025! 🎉 Looking forward to seeing many of you in Suzhou 🇨🇳

1/🚨 New preprint How do #LLMs’ inner features change as they train? Using #crosscoders + a new causal metric, we map when features appear, strengthen, or fade across checkpoints—opening a new lens on training dynamics beyond loss curves & benchmarks. #interpretability

NEW PAPER ALERT: Recent studies have shown that LLMs often lack robustness to distribution shifts in their reasoning. Our paper proposes a new method, AbstRaL, to augment LLMs’ reasoning robustness, by promoting their abstract thinking with granular reinforcement learning.

Check out @bkhmsi.bsky.social 's great work on mixture-of-expert models that are specialized to represent the behavior of known brain networks.

🚨 New Preprint!! Thrilled to share with you our latest work: “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners”, a modular transformer architecture inspired by the brain’s functional networks: language, logic, social reasoning, and world knowledge. 1/ 🧵👇

Excited to present tomorrow at the @c3nlp.bsky.social workshop at #NAACL2025 our position paper: "Hire Your Anthropologist!" 🎓 Led by the amazing Mai Alkhamissi & @lrz-persona.bsky.social, under the supervision of @monadiab77.bsky.social. Don’t miss it! 😄 arXiv link coming soon!

Excited to be at #NAACL2025 in Albuquerque! I’ll be presenting our paper “The LLM Language Network” as an Oral tomorrow at 2:00 PM in Ballroom C, hope to see you there! Looking forward to all the discussions! 🎤 🧠

Before ICLR 2025 comes to an end today, a few #NeuroAI impressions from Singapore. First, very happy to present our work on TopoLM as an oral, here with @neilrathi.bsky.social initial thread: bsky.app/profile/hann... paper: doi.org/10.48550/arX... code: github.com/epflneuroailab

Not at #ICLR2025 this year, but excited that @neilrathi.bsky.social and @hannesmehrer.bsky.social will be presenting our TopoLM paper during Friday’s Oral Session 4C. Don’t miss it!

With the Studio Ghibli AI trend taking over the internet, it's a good moment to reshare a blog post I wrote two years ago: The Curse of "Creative" AI. Interested to hear your thoughts on this matter! medium.com/@bkhmsi/the-...

🚨 New Preprint!! LLMs trained on next-word prediction (NWP) show high alignment with brain recordings. But what drives this alignment—linguistic structure or world knowledge? And how does this alignment evolve during training? Our new paper explores these questions. 👇🧵

Lots of great news out of the EPFL NLP lab these last few weeks. We'll be at @iclr-conf.bsky.social and @naaclmeeting.bsky.social in April / May to present some of our work in training dynamics, model representations, reasoning, and AI democratization. Come chat with us during the conference!

It’s very inspiring how scientists throughout history turned technological limitations into innovation. Constraints spark creativity! ✨ Must watch video: youtu.be/YdOXS_9_P4U?...

Excited to share that our paper, 'The LLM Language Network,' has been accepted to NAACL 2025! Looking forward to presenting it in Albuquerque—see you there! 🏜️ #NAACL2025

🚀 Exciting milestone: Egyptians in AI Research now features 170 amazing minds shaping the future of technology! 🌍💡 Know someone not listed? Submit their info and let's grow this inspiring community! 🤝 Explore here: bkhmsi.github.io/egyptians-in...

Spent the final days of 2024 completely off the grid—no signal, no electricity—trekking through the Sinai mountains. It was peaceful, refreshing, and a welcome escape. Highly recommend stepping away from the digital world once in a while to rediscover the simple beauty nature has to offer ✨

Despite its ups and downs, this year has been a success. I’d like to share some of my accomplishments with you, highlighted in the attached image. Here’s hoping 2025 brings even greater things for us all!

Ablation of LLM "language network" units (dark blue) versus random units (light blue): bsky.app/profile/bkhm... Moreover, this table shows the effect of ablations on next word prediction for a few sample models:

Check out @bkhmsi.bsky.social's summary of our new paper: We identify "language network" units in LLMs using neuroscience approaches and show that ablating these units (but not random ones) drastically impair LLM language performance--moreover, these units better align with human brain data.

🚨 New Paper! Can neuroscience localizers uncover brain-like functional specializations in LLMs? 🧠🤖 Yes! We analyzed 18 LLMs and found units mirroring the brain's language, theory of mind, and multiple demand networks! w/ @gretatuckute.bsky.social, @abosselut.bsky.social, @mschrimpf.bsky.social 🧵👇