Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

✈️ Montreal AI and Neuroscience is over, off to Costa Rica. Great catching up all things NeuroAI with hometown friends. Thanks for the shirt and the bagels, folks!

🔴 Live: Panel discussion #1: @ MAIN2025 The future of Neuroscience - The role of AI ?  with Andreas Tolias, Siva Reddy, Joao Sacramento, Ching Fang + Eva Portelance Moderated by Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social @andreastolias.bsky.social

What I would have done for a dataset like this to exist in grad school! One day, we'll figure out the dorsal stream. openreview.net/forum?id=Ila...

Headed to NeurIPS, looking forward to catching up with you about NeuroAI, foundation models of the brain, AI safety and AI for science

This equivocation of oscillations and continual learning is a bit of stretch... I'm surprised they didn't get dinged by the reviewers for neuro-babble. openreview.net/forum?id=nbM...

We're almost at the end of the year, and that means an end-of-year review! Send me your favorite NeuroAI papers of the year (preprints or published, late last year is fine too).

New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)

I had way too much fun making these diagrams. Sure, it's not as legible as if I had typed out the text; but I feel like these have a bit more personality

🚨 New preprint alert! 🧠🤖 We propose a theory of how learning curriculum affects generalization through neural population dimensionality. Learning curriculum is a determining factor of neural dimensionality - where you start from determines where you end up. 🧠📈 A 🧵: tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨ We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/

Having fun facilitating this amazing group of young Profs at the #Neuro4Pros workshop with @kordinglab.bsky.social and @meganakpeters.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and Hannah Bayer. Watch out world: this is the next generation of leaders! compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...

"Everyone agrees that emergence is important, but they don’t agree on what the word should mean" arxiv.org/abs/2410.15468

𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 by Earl K Miller, Scott L Brincat, Jefferson E Roy This promises to be a must read One day we should create an online journal club to just read these kinds of papers! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

A few years ago, with @tyrellturing.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social and others, we showed one single objective (prediction) was sufficient for explaining specialized pathways of mouse visual cortex: tinyurl.com/2vsjbve7 Super cool to see the same observation now for human visual cortex.

1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

RFI: How can brain science shape frontier-scale AGI? The Amaranth Foundation wants your 2-page ideas on how brain science can guide & govern frontier-scale AGI—incl. short-timeline (2025-2028) scenarios. Send ≤2-page ideas by 29 Aug. Link: blog.amaranth.foundation/p/rfi-neuros...

How can we best use AI in science? Myself and 9 other research fellows from @imperial-ix.bsky.social use AI methods in domains from plant biology (🌱) to neuroscience (🧠) and particle physics (🎇). Together we suggest 10 simple rules @plos.org 🧵 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Curious what cognitive scientists think about this daydreaming proposal from Gwern: gwern.net/ai-daydreaming

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🚨Preprint Alert: Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Contribution of Neural Units using Game Theory: arxiv.org/abs/2506.19732 The result of my MSc thesis is out with @kayson.bsky.social @fatemehhadaeghi.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social @kordinglab.bsky.social, Claus C. Hilgetag

Thrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall! My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵

Does anybody have a good review or blog post on advances in neurosymbolic and program induction methods over the last 2 years? I'm looking for something technical that has the depth of explanation I would expect from, say, Lil' Log. My usual tools have failed me.

A $50k essay competition about consciousness... Any takers? Via @erikhoel.blogsky.venki.dev berggruen.org/essay-compet...

Woo! Thanks for subscribing, all!

🪰 A team of Janelia researchers & collaborators have created a new set of tools for studying motor control of wing movements in fruit flies, providing an important #openscience resource for future studies of fly flight & courtship 🧠 hhmi.news/3H3ohn8

Excited to share a new preprint w/ @michael-lepori.bsky.social & Michael Franke! A dominant approach in AI/cogsci uses *outputs* from AI models (eg logprobs) to predict human behavior. But how does model *processing* (across layers in a forward pass) relate to human real-time processing? 👇 (1/12)

When I realized how dangerous the current agency-driven AI trajectory could be for future generations, I knew I had to do all I could to make AI safer. I recently shared this personal experience, and outlined the scientific solution I envision @TEDTalks⤵️ www.ted.com/talks/yoshua...

Applications are now open for a special cohort of the Brains Accelerator targeting ambitious AI research programs, with a special focus on security and governance capabilities! spec.tech/ai-brains 1/

New Paper: Continuous Thought Machines pub.sakana.ai/ctm/ Neurons in brains use timing and synchronization in the way that they compute, but this is largely ignored in modern neural nets. We believe neural timing is key for the flexibility and adaptability of biological intelligence. Thread ↓

I'm very pleased to share our latest study: ‘Emergence of Language in the Developing Brain’, by L Evanson, P Bourdillon et al: - Paper: ai.meta.com/research/pub... - Blog: ai.meta.com/blog/meta-fa... - Thread below 👇

I just tried the Gemini features in Google Sheets. It's pretty good! You can ask it to perform a simple analysis, and it will do it. I asked it to do a logistic regression, and it imported statsmodels, ran it, printed the results and interpreted them.

Excited to dig into this, from @jeanremiking.bsky.social 's group. Compares neural representations of language across age. The stimulus? Le Petit Prince. ai.meta.com/research/pub...

I think we're overdue for a rollup of the best papers of the past year in NeuroAI. Candidates?

Check out our new paper! Vision models often struggle with learning both transformation-invariant and -equivariant representations at the same time. @hafezghm.bsky.social shows that self-supervised prediction with proper inductive biases achieves both simultaneously. (1/4) #MLSky #NeuroAI

New post: things have been moving very fast in AI. But has safety caught up to capabilities? open.substack.com/pub/naix/p/w...

Any good neuroscience/NeuroAI discord servers I should know about? I feel like the neuroscience town square on bsky is a bit of a ghost town

Loving the new ICLR blogpost track. Here's a cool one on engrams in neuroscience vs mechanistic interpretability: d2jud02ci9yv69.cloudfront.net/2025-04-28-e...

Can o3 curate your reading stack? I asked it about last week in NeuroAI, and while not great, it is much better than anticipated, highlighting 3 solid talks/papers and several other reasonable suggestions. I wouldn't be surprised if this was solved in a couple of gens chatgpt.com/share/680bae...

⚡️ Excited to introduce ZAPBench, our #ICLR2025 spotlight: The Zebrafish Activity Prediction Benchmark measures progress in predicting neural activity within an entire vertebrate brain (70k+ neurons!) Explore interactive visualizations, datasets, code + paper: google-research.github.io/zapbench 🧠🧪

Excellent talk from Zico Kolter at ICLR on AI safety. Science of deep learning and AI safety are some of the most impactful ways academic AI researchers can bend the curve

Some fantastic work on the virtual fly www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to share our state-of-the-art method for in vivo cell-type classification and brain region localization, NEMO, which is now now a spotlight at @iclr-conf.bsky.social ! We use NEMO to characterize the electrophysiological diversity of cell-types across the entire mouse brain. 🐭 🧪 🧠

I asked o3 for help with LaTeX quote boxes. This is the example quote it used. The machines are on to us.

Crowdsourcing this: what are the best examples of scaling laws in foundation models for neuroscience? My top 3 examples: Ctrl+Labs, Sato et al., Mineault et al. @colehurwitz.bsky.social , @mehdiazabou.bsky.social , @nandahkrishna.bsky.social , @averyryoo.bsky.social, @tyrellturing.bsky.social ?

If GPT-4o walked into a neuro-opthalmology clinic, what would it be diagnosed with? Here we administered 51 tests from 6 clinical and experimental batteries to assess vision in commercial AI models. Very proud to share this first work from @genetang.bsky.social's PhD! arxiv.org/abs/2504.10786

The Foundation Model crew at #COSYNE2025. With @josueortc.bsky.social , @colehurwitz.bsky.social , @averyryoo.bsky.social , @nandahkrishna.bsky.social , @auschulz.bsky.social

Another step toward a foundation model of the mouse brain: "Neural Encoding and Decoding at Scale (NEDS)" Trained on neural and behavioral data from 70+ mice, NEDS achieves state-of-the-art prediction of behavior (decoding) and neural responses (encoding) on held-out animals. 🐀

This is a really interesting (and heroic!) map of "dark matter" in the sciences that should be addressed with new tools and datasets. What's the dark matter of neuroscience?