Two new preprints from the lab, First up, causal exploration in humans and LLM's. arxiv.org Human Adults and LLMs as Scientists: Who Benefits from Active Exploration?

Very much looking forward to this!

How do brains plan actions towards goals? To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵 Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Perspective piece from Blake @tyrellturing.bsky.social @mandanas.bsky.social 👇

New perspective piece with @mandanas.bsky.social: We argue, based on LLMs and old connectionist theories, that schemas shouldn't be viewed as distinct from semantic or episodic memories. They're just one end of a detailed-to-abstract memory spectrum: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪

Excited to see our perspective out today! We argue that schemas may not be fundamentally distinct from semantic and episodic memories, but instead lie along a spectrum of abstraction, from detailed episodic experiences to highly abstract knowledge. See more: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

How can machines achieve the kind of flexible learning mastered by our brains? That’s what our own @neurokim.bsky.social is trying to find out! Learn more about ARNI’s work on natural and artificial intelligence: youtu.be/gM8YCaiAWrc?... #BrainAwarenessWeek

Check out the Call for Workshops at RLC this year. There is still nearly a month before the deadline, we are looking forward to your proposals!

What is the relationship between memorization and generalization in AI? Is there a fundamental tradeoff? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorizati... I’ve reviewed some of the evolving perspectives on memorization & generalization in machine learning, from classic perspectives through LLMs.

Excited to share that our work on Visual Symbolic Mechanisms has been accepted to ICLR! 🌴🇧🇷

Huge congratulations! Already looking forward to the breakthroughs you'll lead!

Great deep dive into hierarchical reinforcement learning, essential reading for anyone exploring scalable, structured agents. Shoutout to the authors!

Many LMs default to disjunctive inferences—even when given conjunctive evidence. Unlike children, LMs’ exploration is shaped by the underlying causal rule. Could promoting child-like curiosity help LMs reason more effectively about causality? More details: arxiv.org/abs/2505.09614

A great collab with former labmates @agx-chen.bsky.social & @dongyanl1n.bsky.social. Interesting limitation in LMs: strong disjunctive bias leads to poor performance on conjunctive causal inference tasks. Mirrors adult human biases--possibly a byproduct of training data prior.

Just over a week since I defended my 🤖+🧠PhD thesis, and the feeling is just sinking in. Extremely grateful to @tyrellturing.bsky.social for supporting me through this amazing journey! 🙏 Big thanks to all members of the LiNC lab, and colleagues at mcgill University and @mila-quebec.bsky.social. ❤️😁

The slides of my NeurIPS lecture "From Diffusion Models to Schrödinger Bridges - Generative Modeling meets Optimal Transport" can be found here drive.google.com/file/d/1eLa3...

I gave a talk on Compositional World Models at NeurIPS last week 🌐 The recording is now online: neurips.cc/virtual/2024... (for registered attendees; starts at 6:06:00) Workshop: compositional-learning.github.io

🔊 Super excited to announce the first ever Frontiers of Probabilistic Inference: Learning meets Sampling workshop at #ICLR2025 @iclr-conf.bsky.social! 🔗 website: sites.google.com/view/fpiwork... 🔥 Call for papers: sites.google.com/view/fpiwork... more details in thread below👇 🧵

If you review for a #ML conference like @iclr-conf.bsky.social or @neuripsconf.bsky.social, YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO REPLY TO THE AUTHORS. If the rebuttal doesn't address your concerns explain why. But giving a score of 2-3 then ghosting the authors is super rude. I say this as an AC. #MLSky

Now that @jeffclune.bsky.social and @joelbot3000.bsky.social are here, time for an Open-Endedness starter pack. go.bsky.app/MdVxrtD

4/ I think the proper definition is that #NeuroAI is the realization of the original promise of cybernetics and connectionism! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberne... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect... It is a general science of intelligence focussed on parallel distributed systems, control, and learning.

1/ I work in #NeuroAI, a growing field of research, which many people have only the haziest conception of... As way of introduction to this research approach, I'll provide here a very short thread outlining the definition of the field I gave recently at our BRAIN NeuroAI workshop at the NIH. 🧠📈

I wish that I was able to convince the students in my class that the ultimate goal of science isn't accumulation of facts but the compression of facts into theories. Mel summarizes it well here: www.nature.com/articles/nn1... Unfortunately, I think this is a minority viewpoint within neuroscience.