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Reposted by Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit

Sainsbury Wellcome Centre @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · 8d

Congratulations to all the new SWC & @gatsbyucl.bsky.social PhD students for successfully completing Boot Camp!

We are delighted to welcome you to the community.

Students showcased their robots in our hotly anticipated annual @noblackboxes.bsky.social Robot Competition 🦾⚽💻

Photo of staff and students at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, with robots competing in a football match.

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Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit @gatsbyucl.bsky.social · 13d

🙋Are you interested in bridging theory & experiments?

Applications are now open for 2026 entry to the Gatsby Unit & SWC joint PhD programme.

Join us and be part of a vibrant research community!

💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme
ℹ️ www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...

@sainsburywellcome.bsky.social

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Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit @gatsbyucl.bsky.social · 15d

Interested in a #PhD in machine learning & theoretical neuroscience?

Applications for 2026 entry to the Gatsby Unit PhD programme are open!

💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme
🤝 Close links to @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social
ℹ️ www.ucl.ac.uk/life-sciences/gatsby/study-and-work/gatsby-unit-phd-programme

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Sainsbury Wellcome Centre @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · Sep 3

A complete brain-wide activity map at single-cell resolution has been revealed for the first time.

Researchers recorded from 650,000+ neurons across 279 brain areas to track decision-making in mice.

Read the story:
🔗 www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/research...

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Virginia M. S. Ruetten @vmsruetten.bsky.social · Sep 8

Made possible only by the unique environment and amazing community at Janelia and the Gatsby. @hhmijanelia.bsky.social @gatsbyucl.bsky.social

Feedback, ideas, or requests for transgenic lines, protocols, and code are warmly welcome!

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Motonobu Kanagawa @motonobu-kanagawa.bsky.social · Sep 4

ProbNum 2025 Keynote 2 ``Gradient Flows on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy'' by @arthurgretton.bsky.social ( @gatsbyucl.bsky.social and Google DeepMind.

Slides available here: probnum25.github.io/keynotes

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Gen AI - the AI Hub in Generative Models @genaihub.bsky.social · Aug 27

📢 ❗JOB OPPORTUNITY: Today is the closing date for this fantastic role we are funding at @gatsbyucl.bsky.social.
⏰ Apply before 23.59BST. 👇

Gen AI - the AI Hub in Generative Models @genaihub.bsky.social · Aug 6

JOB: We're recruiting for a 2-year post doc fellowship based at @gatsbyucl.bsky.social working with Prof Arthur Gretton to create new statistically efficient causal and interaction models with the aim of elucidating cellular interactions
⏰closing 27 August
👉 details: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

www.ucl.ac.uk

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Sainsbury Wellcome Centre @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · Aug 18

Aeon is a new platform for continuous brain and behaviour research in naturalistic environments — already used in 15+ projects, including long-term social learning studies.

🔗 www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/blog/new...
📄 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Erin Grant @eringrant.me · Aug 13

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

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Erin Grant @eringrant.me · Aug 13

Main takeaway: Valid representational comparison relies on implicit assumptions (task-optimization *plus* efficient implementation). ⚠️ More work to do on making these assumptions explicit!

🧠 CCN poster (today): 2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=w...

📄 ICML paper (July): icml.cc/virtual/2025/poster/44890

ICML Poster Not all solutions are created equal: An analytical dissociation of functional and representational similarity in deep linear neural networksICML 2025

icml.cc

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Erin Grant @eringrant.me · Aug 13

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

Speakers and organizers of the GAC debate. Time and location of the GAC debate: 5 PM in Room C1.03.

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Arthur Gretton @arthurgretton.bsky.social · Aug 11

Sequential kernel embedding for mediated and time-varying dose response curves

Appearing in Bernoulli:
projecteuclid.org/journals/ber...

with preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2111.03950

...along with code!
github.com/liyuan9988/K...

Rahul Singh, Liyuan Xu

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Gen AI - the AI Hub in Generative Models @genaihub.bsky.social · Aug 6

JOB: We're recruiting for a 2-year post doc fellowship based at @gatsbyucl.bsky.social working with Prof Arthur Gretton to create new statistically efficient causal and interaction models with the aim of elucidating cellular interactions
⏰closing 27 August
👉 details: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

www.ucl.ac.uk

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Samuel Liebana @samuel-liebana.bsky.social · Jun 15

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!

Dopamine encodes deep network teaching signals for individual learning trajectories

Longitudinal tracking of long-term learning behavior and striatal dopamine reveals that dopamine teaching signals shape individually diverse yet systematic learning trajectories, captured mathematical...

www.cell.com

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Sainsbury Wellcome Centre @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · Aug 1

New from @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social, @gatsbyucl.bsky.social, NeuroGEARS & DataJoint:

Aeon - an open-source platform combining long-term neural recording with naturalistic behavioural tracking in enriched habitats.

📑 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Aeon: an open-source platform to study the neural basis of ethological behaviours over naturalistic timescales

Ethological behaviours are a powerful tool for neuroscience since they leverage the robust neural computations shaped by the species' evolution to study the neural basis of high-level cognitive functi...

www.biorxiv.org

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Clementine Domine 🍊 @CCN @clementinedomine.bsky.social · Jul 29

🎓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!

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Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit @gatsbyucl.bsky.social · Jul 21

🥳 Congratulations to Rodrigo Carrasco-Davison on passing his PhD viva with minor corrections! 🎉

📜 Principles of Optimal Learning Control in Biological and Artificial Agents.

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Andrew Saxe @saxelab.bsky.social · Jul 15

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

Andrew Saxe @saxelab.bsky.social · Jun 4

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

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Andrew Saxe @saxelab.bsky.social · Jul 14

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...

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ICML Poster Algorithm Development in Neural Networks: Insights from the Streaming Parity TaskICML 2025

icml.cc

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Arthur Gretton @arthurgretton.bsky.social · Jul 14

Distributional diffusion models with scoring rules at #icml25

Fewer, larger denoising steps using distributional losses!

Wednesday 11am poster E-1910

arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02483

@vdebortoli.bsky.social
Galashov Guntupalli Zhou
@sirbayes.bsky.social
@arnauddoucet.bsky.social

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Arthur Gretton @arthurgretton.bsky.social · Jul 14

Accelerated Diffusion Models via Speculative Sampling, at #icml25 !

16:30 Tuesday July 15 poster E-3012

arxiv.org/abs/2501.05370

@vdebortoli.bsky.social Galashov @arnauddoucet.bsky.social

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Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit @gatsbyucl.bsky.social · Jul 11

Leena Chennuru Vankadara (@leenacvankadara.bsky.social) will also give:
- a tutorial 'Training Neural Networks at Any Scale' (Mon 14 Jul)
- and a talk at ‪WiML Symposium at ICML (Wed 16 Jul).
Don't miss out!

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Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit @gatsbyucl.bsky.social · Jul 11

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

List of posters by/involving Gatsby Unit researchers

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Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit @gatsbyucl.bsky.social · Jul 11

🎊 Congratulations to Kevin Huang (@kevhhuang.bsky.social‬) on passing his PhD viva with minor corrections! 🥳

🔖 Universality beyond the classical asymptotic regime

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Sainsbury Wellcome Centre @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · Jul 11

It was a pleasure to welcome work experience students to SWC and @gatsbyucl.bsky.social this week, through the Camden STEAM initiative with @ucllifesciences.bsky.social

They explored our labs and learned about the many paths into #neuroscience

www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/content/...

A-Level Students from Camden visiting the Advanced Microscopy Facilities at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre.

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