I keep telling this to students. If you really want to do SAE research, just find a great classic paper on topic modeling and reimplement it using SAEs. I don’t think anyone would really notice.

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Applications are due in one month for our Workshop on Canonical Cortical Computations: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/11/13/simons-foundation-now-accepting-applications-for-workshop-on-canonical-cortical-computations/ #science #neuroscience

At #NeurIPS2025! 🎉 Excited to present Conditionally Linear Dynamical Systems (CLDS). We leverage the dependence of neural dynamics on task covariates to yield an interpretable, flexible model of dynamics. Come meet and check it out! 📍: Poster #2209, Hall C,D,E on Thu Dec 4, 11 am–2 pm, PST. 🧵/6

This is joint work with amazing collaborators: Amin Nejatbakhsh (@aminejat.bsky.social), David Lipshutz ( @lipshutz.bsky.social), Jonathan Pillow (@jpillowtime.bsky.social), and Alex Williams (@itsneuronal.bsky.social). 🔗 OpenReview: openreview.net/forum?id=xgm... 🖥️ Code: github.com/neurostatsla...

We are excited to announce that the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting (CCN 2026) will be held at New York University from August 3–6, 2026. 2026.ccneuro.org

We are opening a FACULTY POSITION (tenure track, permanent) in the University of Cambridge at the interface of control and biology, interpreted broadly. Theorists and wet lab quantitative biologists with backgrounds in control, EE, applied math, ... apply by Jan 28! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

Under Trump, the NIH is giving fewer grants to fewer scientists. The grants awarded are smaller and scientists have less time to spend them. Projects in cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorder, and more are going unfunded. “Make America Healthy Again.”

The latest superlab journal club: @hritz.bsky.social discussing his latest preprint investigating task switching in brains and machines. youtu.be/MdOkOjSa7JA

@thetransmitter.bsky.social’s “New Lab Directory” features a list of new neuroscience labs that opened in 2024-2025, and some set to launch in 2026. Check out the list to learn about the work of more than 50 new neuroscience labs. www.thetransmitter.org/community/th... #StateOfNeuroscience

Thank you for the great summary, @thetransmitter.bsky.social, and the shout-outs from scientists we admire. There is so much we don’t know about how sex hormones modulate behavior and we’ll keep exploring!

Intuitive cell types don't necessarily play the ascribed functional role in the overall computation. This is not a message the field wants to hear as it suggests better baselines, controls, and some reflection. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 2/2

This week the Trump CDC attacked science — and our health, and our kids’ health — by twisting the truth on the CDC website. There’s things to say about the playbook they used, and that’s helped by a little explanation about scientific truth in practice. New vid explainer from me: 🧪 part 1/

🔔 NEW PREPRINT FROM THE LAB ‼️ We introduce a new ML model, LoRAX, for predicting olfactory responses from chemical features, a tricky problem that benefits from progress in ML for biochem. We combine LoRA fine-tuning with protein and chemical foundation models, www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

As a longtime fan of cool papers in @currentbiology.bsky.social, I am really thrilled to see this out! This study sets the stage for understanding the origins of novel (vocal) behaviors. Big shout out to the main architects of this work @xmikezheng20.bsky.social and @cliffscience.bsky.social

Like most animals, fish move less at night. Underwater, stable posture requires movement. Find out how fish don't fall down at night in: Lighting and circadian cues shape locomotor strategies for balance and navigation in larval zebrafish from @yunluzhu.bsky.social doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Excited to share this work where we found how fish swim differently to keep balance in the dark / explore more in the light. Spoiler: ever wonder what they do during “little pauses” between swims? They are counting!

The UniReps Workshop accepted papers are out! 🎉 Huge thanks to the authors, reviewers, and incredible AC committee for their dedication and effort in making this happen. 🙏 openreview.net/group?id=Neu...

Note: this has a computational scientist track! It’s for you, too, math nerds!

Hearing a rumor that NIH/HHS may now plan to retaliate against other Bethesda Declaration signers. I am one, but it’s not about me: we have been speaking out because of the ongoing damage to US medical research, cancer and Alzheimer’s research. As @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social put well: 1/

Our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com introduces improv, a flexible software platform that integrates models with experiments in real-time. Traditional experiments collect all data first, then analyze it later. With improv, models analyze data as it streams in and actively guide what to do next.

I entirely agree. Research in rodents has enabled remarkable technical advances and deepened our understanding of brainstem circuits and general brain physiology. However, only NHPs possess cognitive, visual, and motor faculties necessary to advance human-relevant systems neuroscience.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #blueprint 1/7

Our next paper on comparing dynamical systems (with special interest to artificial and biological neural networks) is out!! Joint work with @annhuang42.bsky.social , as well as @satpreetsingh.bsky.social , @leokoz8.bsky.social , Ila Fiete, and @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social : arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25943

ATTN: Two faculty positions are available in my department (neuroscience) at the University of Minnesota. This is a general search with no topic focus. November 20th application deadline. Apply here: hr.umn.edu/jobs/Find-Job Assistant Prof job code: 364920 Associate/Full Prof job code: 364921

Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...

I wrote an explainer about the mass firings—the RIFs. The RIFs all year have been clearly illegal. Russell Vought is using them to lawlessly clean out federal agencies. Lower court judges have said so. But the Calvinball Supreme Court has allowed them. 1/

Pleased to share new work with @sflippl.bsky.social @eberleoliver.bsky.social @thomasmcgee.bsky.social & undergrad interns at Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, UCLA. Algorithmic Primitives and Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models www.arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15987 🧵1/n

Fisher meets Feynman! 🤝 We use score matching and a trick from quantum field theory to make a product-of-experts family both expressive and efficient for variational inference. To appear as a spotlight @ NeurIPS 2025. #NeurIPS2025 (link below)

Want the freedom of a fancy fellowship, but not the year-long wait or arduous application? Come join my lab! Work on neuroscience and AI, explore your creativity, be independent or work closely with me, collaborate widely, and have a lot of fun! my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Hotter take: We should only be reporting nonasymptotic confidence intervals using empirical Bernstein inequality or something similar. Dividing by sqrt(n) is incorrect unless n = infinity. (To be clear, I am 100% trolling)

Looking for a PhD program where you can study computational neuroscience? NYU has a fantastic array of researchers covering the field: groups.google.com/g/systems-ne...

A new essay on the crazy, all or nothing approach to work happening in AI today, the looming human costs, and the lack of a finish line. I wouldn't say it's okay, but I'm not sure how to fix it. www.interconnects.ai/p/burning-out

Excited to share our new work with @engeltatiana.bsky.social! RNNs are often used to explore how the brain may solve specific tasks. We show that, depending on the architecture, RNNs find distinct circuit solutions, behaving differently when exposed to novel stimuli. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

The NIH institute director firing last Friday is very bad. I made a video explainer about why. Stay for last post, w link to @science.org story from @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social 1/4 🧪

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Delighted to share our new paper, now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain" with dream team @alecmarantz.bsky.social, @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @jeanremiking.bsky.social Summary 👇 1/8

🚨Pre-print alert! 🚨https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.17.683171v1 Our new study tackles the question: do all neurons in motor cortices (MC) encode movement & coordinate as we move? Answering this question will be key for effectively targeting motor representations in BCIs.

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

This one hits close to home. Jim is my office neighbor. Absolutely devastating.

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...

Over the past year, my lab has been working on fleshing out theory + applications of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Today I want to share two new works on this topic: Eliciting higher alignment: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02425 Unpaired learning of unified reps: arxiv.org/abs/2510.08492 1/9

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain. A brief rundown... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S. Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world. www.nobelprize.org

Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans? New paper on this from my group: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125 🧵 1/10

Federal workers are speaking out on how the Trump regime is harming Americans: "We stand here today at a moment of the greatest assault of our lifetimes on our freedoms. The US Constitution is being shredded... We are here to call on Congress to stand up and stop it." youtu.be/uw1KwIBgrCw?...

The neural control & computation lab is recruiting! If you're interested in using large-scale neural population recordings to study how the brain learns to produce complex and flexible behaviours, please get in touch. www.ncclab.ca

Many treat uncertainty = a number. At Apple, we're rethinking this: LLMs should output strings that reveal all information of their internal distributions. We find that Reasoning, SFT, CoT can't do it - yet. To get there, we introduce the SelfReflect benchmark. arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20295

Did you know that facial expressions reveal more than meets the eye? 🤯 Our new study shows that even a mouse's face 🐭 can reflect hidden neural computations🧠. Turns out, facial expressions are more than just emotions! We're so excited to see this paper out @natneuro.nature.com 🎉 🔗: rdcu.be/eIQzO

Interested in doing a Ph.D. to work on building models of the brain/behavior? Consider applying to graduate schools at CU Anschutz: 1. Neuroscience www.cuanschutz.edu/graduate-pro... 2. Bioengineering engineering.ucdenver.edu/bioengineeri... You could work with several comp neuro PIs, including me.