Structure transfer and consolidation in visual implicit learning 🧠🟦 🧠🤖 elifesciences.org/articles/100...

1/ 🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩 #neuroskyence

What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !

Here is our best thinking about how to make world models. I would apologize for it being a massive 40-page behemoth, but it's worth reading. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09737

Just spent two wonderful weeks in London for the Analytical Connectionism Summer School (hosted at Gatsby/UCL this year). Met lots of wonderful scientists at the intersection of cog neuro and machine learning. Learned a lot and can’t recommend more highly! Small meetings rule

I recently learned: w/ lesioned 8A, you can do many WM tasks but not one👇 Guess what happens when you decoding from 8A during each of these tasks? They are all the same. Decoding is like a quality check, it provides almost no info about function scholar.google.com/citations?vi...

We all know that correlation doesn't imply causation. So we took some correlations and tested if they were causal. Here's what happened: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Our #CCN2025 GAC debate w/ @gretatuckute.bsky.social, Gemma Roig (www.cvai.cs.uni-frankfurt.de), Jacqueline Gottlieb (gottlieblab.com), Klaus Oberauer, @mschrimpf.bsky.social &‬ @brittawestner.bsky.social asks: 📊 What benchmarks are useful for cognitive science? 💭 2025.ccneuro.org/gac

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

My first PhD paper - with @lhuntneuro.bsky.social and @summerfieldlab.bsky.social - is now out in @plosbiology.org! We ask: how do humans (and deep neural networks) navigate flexibly even in unfamiliar environments, such as a new city? Link: plos.io/45uSwNm 🧵 (1/6)

🚨Pre-print alert🚨 We stimulated serotonin with optogenetics while doing large-scale Neuropixel recordings across the mouse brain. We found strong widespread modulation of neural activity, but no effect on the choices of the mouse 🐭 How is this possible? Strap in! (1/9) 👇🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience! Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss. bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...

12 leading neuroscientists tackle a big question: Will we ever understand the brain? Their reflections span philosophy, complexity, and the limits of scientific explanation. www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/blog/wil... Illustration by @gilcosta.bsky.social & @joanagcc.bsky.social

Coming March 17, 2026! Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

🎓Thrilled to share I’ve officially defended my PhD!🥳 At @gatsbyucl.bsky.social, my research explored how prior knowledge shapes neural representations. I’m deeply grateful to my mentors, @saxelab.bsky.social and @caswell.bsky.social, my incredible collaborators, and everyone who supported me!

Trying to train RNNs in a biol plausible (local) way? Well, try our new method using predictive alignment. Paper just out in Nat. Com. Toshitake Asabuki deserves all the credit! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🥳 Congratulations to Rodrigo Carrasco-Davison on passing his PhD viva with minor corrections! 🎉 📜 Principles of Optimal Learning Control in Biological and Artificial Agents.

Welcome to Bluesky @kenneth-harris.bsky.social !

🎉 Heron is finally out @elife.bsky.social! Led by George Dimitriadis, with Ella Svahn & @macaskillaf.bsky.social 🧪 🧠 🐭 🤖 If you wonder why yet another tool for experimental pipelines, read the 🧵 below: #neuroscience #neuroskyence #OpenSource 1/ elifesciences.org/articles/91915

Come chat about this at the poster @icmlconf.bsky.social, 11:00-13:30 on Wednesday in the West Exhibition Hall #W-902!

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)

👋 Attending #ICML2025 next week? Don't forget to check out work involving our researchers!

Super excited to see this paper from Armin Lak & colleagues out! (I've seen @saxelab.bsky.social present it before.) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... tl;dr: The learning trajectories that individual mice take correspond to different saddle points in a deep net's loss landscape. 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

Thanks to fellow defenders @clionaod.bsky.social, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, and @charvetcj.bsky.social Defending the foundation model view of infant development www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Not just one, but two fantastic chances to discuss how infant development can inform machine learning and vice-versa at CCN 2025 in Amsterdam!!! Satellite workshop sites.google.com/view/child2m... and Generative Adversarial Collaboration sites.google.com/ccneuro.org/...

Shunichi Amari has been awarded the 40th (2025) Kyoto Prize in recognition of his pioneering research in the fields of artificial neural networks, machine learning, and information geometry www.riken.jp/pr/news/2025...

How do task dynamics impact learning in networks with internal dynamics? Excited to share our ICML Oral paper on learning dynamics in linear RNNs! with @clementinedomine.bsky.social @mpshanahan.bsky.social and Pedro Mediano openreview.net/forum?id=KGO...

Does the brain learn by gradient descent? It's a pleasure to share our paper at @cp-cell.bsky.social, showing how mice learning over long timescales display key hallmarks of gradient descent (GD). The culmination of my PhD supervised by @laklab.bsky.social, @saxelab.bsky.social and Rafal Bogacz!

New research shows long-term learning is shaped by dopamine signals that act as partial reward prediction errors. The study in mice reveals how early behavioural biases predict individual learning trajectories. Find out more ⬇️ www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/blog/lon...

Read the full paper ‘Dopamine encodes deep network teaching signals for individual learning trajectories’ in @cellpress.bsky.social ⬇️ www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... ‪@yulonglilab.bsky.social‬‬‬ @saxelab.bsky.social ‪@oxforddpag.bsky.social‬‬‬ @laklab.bsky.social

Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

One way to tackle a new task is to reuse solutions from the past. Check out Sam Hall-McMaster's latest finding that strategy reuse is accompanied by neural reactivation of prior solutions @plosbiology.org Collab w/ M Tomov & @gershbrain.bsky.social #neuroskyence journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

How does in-context learning emerge in attention models during gradient descent training? Sharing our new Spotlight paper @icmlconf.bsky.social: Training Dynamics of In-Context Learning in Linear Attention arxiv.org/abs/2501.16265 Led by Yedi Zhang with @aaditya6284.bsky.social and Peter Latham

We just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance? Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... led by @jrbch.bsky.social

Most of us in higher ed in the US are going to lose something over the next four years (opportunities, or funding, or time). But if we believe universities exist, in part, to preserve historical memory and create a space for dissent, our primary job right now is to fight and take the hit.

Our paper just came out in PRX! Congrats to Nishil Patel and the rest of the team* TL;DR: We analyse policy learning through the lens of statphys, revealing distinct scaling regimes with sharp transitions. 🔗 journals.aps.org/prx/abstract... *Seb Lee @sebgoldt.bsky.social @saxelab.bsky.social

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation. rdcu.be/el18q A short thread follows for those interested. 1/n

📢 Fantastic post doc job opportunity in my group and co-supervised by DeepMind's @mariaeckstein.bsky.social - now live! Ad here: tinyurl.com/26rafzdc - deadline May 29th. This is part of a very exciting collaboration with @melgaby.bsky.social and Matt Nour, funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social.

🧠🤖 Computational Neuroscience summer school IMBIZO in Cape Town is open for applications again!   💻🧬 3 weeks of intense coursework & projects with support from expert tutors and faculty   📈Apply until July 1st! 🔗https://imbizo.africa/

Today we honor one of computational #neuroscience’s founding parents, Professor Jay McClelland. Jay, along with Rumelhart, and Hinton @nobelprize.bsky.social, is broadly thought to be responsible for ushering in the second wave of connectionism with their Parallel Distributed Processing book...

I’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026! I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory! RT appreciated! (1/5)

Our paper "Solve Layerwise Linear Models First to Understand Neural Dynamical Phenomena" has been accepted as a position paper to ICML 2025! arxiv.org/abs/2502.21009 These models offer a tractable path to understanding complex neural dynamics—before diving into full nonlinearity. 1/4

Excited to share our new study: "Cold memories control whole-body thermoregulatory responses" by @andreamunozz.bsky.social, @aaron-douglas.bsky.social & team at @tcddublin.bsky.social, in collaboration with @lydialynch.bsky.social & @drchristineannd.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A good step. Brown, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Penn, MIT among the 150+ signatories. But Columbia, Northwestern, Hopkins, Stanford, Caltech, UC except for Riverside, among those who fail to sign.

My lab has several postdoctoral fellow and software engineering positions available. Please email me if you’re interested.

For our next UCL #NeuroAI online seminar, we are happy to host Dr Shaul Druckmann (@stanforduniversity.bsky.social, @stanfordpsy.bsky.social). 🗓️Wed 16 April 2025 ⏰4-5pm BST Talk title: 'Relating circuit dynamics to computation: robustness and dimension-specific computation in cortical dynamics'

Interested in foundation models for #neuroscience? Want to contribute to the development of the next-generation of multi-modal models? Come join us at IVADO in Montreal! We're hiring a full-time machine learning specialist for this work. Please share widely! #NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪