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Reposted by Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦

Brokoslaw Laschowski @drlaschowski.bsky.social · Sep 5

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience.

#neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

Professor - Computational Cognitive Neuroscience

jobs.utoronto.ca

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Reposted by Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦

Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · Aug 18

If you work on artificial or natural intelligence and are finishing your PhD, consider applying for a Kempner research fellowship at Harvard:
kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/kempner-inst...

Kempner Research Fellowship - Kempner Institute

The Kempner brings leading, early-stage postdoctoral scientists to Harvard to work on projects that advance the fundamental understanding of intelligence.

kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu

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Reposted by Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦

Taylor Webb @taylorwwebb.bsky.social · Aug 15

New position paper! We argue that symbolic and neural network models are not in opposition to each other, but occupy different levels of analysis, and also outline a new research agenda for better understanding the relationship between them. Please check out the paper / thread for more details!

Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · Aug 15

🤖 🧠 NEW PAPER ON COGSCI & AI 🧠 🤖

Recent neural networks capture properties long thought to require symbols: compositionality, productivity, rapid learning

So what role should symbols play in theories of the mind? For our answer...read on!

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.05776

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The top shows the title and authors of the paper: "Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks?" by Tom Griffiths, Brenden Lake, Tom McCoy, Ellie Pavlick, and Taylor Webb.

At the bottom is text saying "Modern neural networks display capacities traditionally believed to require symbolic systems. This motivates a re-assessment of the role of symbols in cognitive theories."

In the middle is a graphic illustrating this text by showing three capacities: compositionality, productivity, and inductive biases. For each one, there is an illustration of a neural network displaying it. For compositionality, the illustration is DALL-E 3 creating an image of a teddy bear skateboarding in Times Square. For productivity, the illustration is novel words produced by GPT-2: "IKEA-ness", "nonneotropical", "Brazilianisms", "quackdom", "Smurfverse". For inductive biases, the illustration is a graph showing that a meta-learned neural network can learn formal languages from a small number of examples.

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Aug 11

did someone forget something at home?

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Aug 9

I will also give a short talk on our laterally connected topographical neural network model at the first session of “Modeling the Physical Brain: Spatial Organization and Biophysical Constraints”

talk: Monday, Aug 11, 12:15-12:30pm CET, Room A2.07
preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Aug 9

@motahareh will present her work on a neural network model of visual search that replicates a wide range of behavioral and neural phenomena while making new predictions about its underlying neural code

poster: C145, Friday, Aug 15, 2-5pm, de Brug & E‑Hall
preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Aug 9

@maximemdaigle.bsky.social will present his work on using neural networks to decode what and how (non)spatially selective hippocampal neurons encode!

talk: Friday, Aug 15, 12–1pm, Room C1.03
poster: C68, Friday, Aug 15, 2-5pm, de Brug & E‑Hall
preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Aug 9

We’ll be at CCN next week with two posters, one contributed talk and one satellite talk! If you are interested in neural coding in primate hippocampus, modeling visual search, or cortical topography come and talk to us! See👇for details:

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Aug 7

You might this relevant too, in terms of robustness

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Local lateral connectivity is sufficient for replicating cortex-like topographical organization in deep neural networks

Across the primate cortex, neurons that perform similar functions tend to be spatially grouped together. In the high-level visual cortex, this biological principle manifests itself as a modular organi...

www.biorxiv.org

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Jul 31

Are you thinking of automating the review process? LLMs are already doing some of that. I’m pretty sure at least 25% of reviews at conferences are already LLM-generated.

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Jul 26

I'm not sure which two papers you are talking about but I didn't notice the PNAS paper I posted in the preprint

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Jul 26

interesting

Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Jul 15

Went over the Centaur paper in lab meeting today. I got stuck on this plot, thinking initially the small difference between Llama and Centaur is bothering me. But the real issue hit me an hour later... Each layer's neural similarity is with the **whole** brain! No single layer is expected to sim 🧠

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Jul 11

Congratulations on the paper! It made me think of this paper by Pawan Sinha on developmentally aligned training of neural networks: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
It's interesting to see that this procedure leads to much broader robustness than previously thought.

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

www.pnas.org

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Jul 10

Grant reviewer on my proposal for using DNNs to model working memory: “The ability to yield new information is very limited because WM circuits have already been abundantly specified in clinical and preclinical studies.” So, it’s entirely solved now, eh? How long did I sleep last night?

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Reposted by Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦

Shahab Bakhtiari @shahabbakht.bsky.social · Jul 9

Huge congratulations to @silicolabs.bsky.social on this achievement.

Excited about this collaboration on visuomotor learning in VR.

We also have some funding available for graduate students interested in doing research in this area. Reach out if you're interested.

🧠📈 🧠🤖 #VisionScience

SilicoLabs @silicolabs.bsky.social · Jul 9

We're thrilled to announce we're recipients of the QC Science Impact Grant by Esplanade Québec & Fonds de recherche du Québec! This $10,000 grant supports a collaborative research project with Dr. @shahabbakht.bsky.social.
esplanade.quebec/16-entrepris...

Les lauréat.e.s du programme Science Impact- Esplanade Québec

Grâce aux FRQ, des bourses de 10 000 $ ont été remises à des startups souhaitant réaliser des projets de recherche.

esplanade.quebec

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Jul 9

Attractors are great for framing neural dynamics, but I agree, by themselves they’re **not** mechanisms. My favourite papers don’t just point to attractors; they show how those attractors drive tasks (e.g., the 2013 @valeriomante & @sussillodavid.bsky.social classic: nature.com/articles/nature12742)

Context-dependent computation by recurrent dynamics in prefrontal cortex - Nature

This study shows that in monkeys making context-dependent decisions, task-relevant and task-irrelevant signals are confusingly intermixed in single units of the prefrontal cortex, but are readily unde...

www.nature.com

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Jun 28

Self supervised learning of spatial representations from episodic memories. Led by undergraduate student in my lab. Very proud!

Herbie(Zizhan) He @herbiehe.bsky.social · Jun 28

🧠 Can a neural network build a spatial map from scattered episodic experiences like humans do?

We introduce the Episodic Spatial World Model (ESWM)—a model that constructs flexible internal world models from sparse, disjoint memories.

🧵👇 [1/12]

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Jun 27

Congratulations Dan! I’m sure you’ll do great things in your lab.

Reposted by Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦

Hannes Mehrer @hannesmehrer.bsky.social · May 27

Announcement: Workshop at #CCN2025
🧠 Modeling the Physical Brain: Spatial Organization & Biophysical Constraints
🗓️ Monday, Aug 11 | 🕦 11:30–18:00 CET | 📍 Room A2.07
🔗 Register: tinyurl.com/CCN-physical...
#NeuroAI @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

Home

tinyurl.com

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · May 3

Nice work! We also showed recently that performances on typical benchmarks are not good measures of neural predictivity in macaques anymore. Improving robustness could still boost predicivitity a bit though

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

How well do models of visual cortex generalize to out of distribution samples?

Author summary Inspired by the neural circuits of the brain, deep neural networks (DNN) have been steadily improving in their ability to perform foundational visual tasks such as object recognition. W...

journals.plos.org

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Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @bashivan.bsky.social · Apr 24

If you are at #ICLR2025 and interested in topographic neural networks, come by @amirozhan.bsky.social 's poster. See the info below!

Amir Ozhan Dehghani @amirozhan.bsky.social · Apr 23

I’ll be at @iclr-conf.bsky.social presenting our work “Credit-based self organizing maps: training deep topographic networks with minimal performance degradation” — if you're into #NeuroAI, cortical topography, vision, or just up for a good convo, drop by and DM me! 🧠✨

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Reposted by Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦

Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · Apr 16

A point of pride for me was publishing a paper with a meme as a graphical abstract in a journal that dates back to 1878:

physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

This is apparently a #TopViewedArticle, so the achievement got the recognition it deserves! 😅

CC @kordinglab.bsky.social

The study of plasticity has always been about gradients

Abstract figure legend This figure illustrates our central point in this paper using a well-known meme. That central point is that the physiological study of synaptic plasticity and learning has alwa...

physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Reposted by Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦

Save the CBC 🇨🇦✌️ @savethecbc.bsky.social · Apr 6

Don’t let Poilievre crush your CBC crush!

From Paul Gross to Peter Mansbridge, Catherine O’Hara to the Levys—CBC has brought us icons we’ve loved for decades.

Lose CBC, lose the crushes.

#SaveTheCBC #CBCrushed #OurVoiceOurCBC #CdnPoli #PublicBroadcasting

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Reposted by Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦

University of Toronto @utoronto.ca · Mar 27

Renowned neuroscientist Melanie Woodin has been named #UofT’s 17th president — and asks the community to join in her in “dreaming big.” #UofT alumna Woodin starts her five-year term July 1st. ➡️ uoft.me/uoftpres17

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