Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Olivier Codol

@oliviercodol.bsky.social

1.5K followers 250 following 120 posts

Post-doc at Mila & U de Montréal in Guillaume Lajoie & Matt Perich's labs Focus on neuroscience, RL for motor learning, neural control of movement, NeuroAI.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · Oct 7

Here’s our latest work at @glajoie.bsky.social and @mattperich.bsky.social ‘s labs! Excited to see this out.

We used a combination of neural recordings & modelling to show that RL yields neural dynamics closer to biology, with useful continual learning properties.

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

Brain-like neural dynamics for behavioral control develop through reinforcement learning

During development, neural circuits are shaped continuously as we learn to control our bodies. The ultimate goal of this process is to produce neural dynamics that enable the rich repertoire of behavi...

www.biorxiv.org

1 6 21

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · 21h

Congrats, very happy for the lab! Looking forward to seeing the great science that this new location will inspire you all to do

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Andrew Pruszynski @andpru.bsky.social · 7d

We will have an NHP position open at @westernu.ca this year. Posting is coming soon. If you're interested about our setup and the opportunities here, feel free to get in touch.

1 19 26

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · 17d

Fantastic news, congrats!

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Matt Perich @mattperich.bsky.social · Aug 13

🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.

2 25 83

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · Aug 9

Interesting, I was actually wondering about this. Any reason they picked off-policy methods specifically (over on-policy)?

1 1

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Matt Perich @mattperich.bsky.social · Aug 4

📰 I really enjoyed writing this article with @thetransmitter.bsky.social! In it, I summarize parts of our recent perspective article on neural manifolds (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), with a focus on highlighting just a few cool insights into the brain we've already seen at the population level.

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · Aug 4

Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with competing and multifaceted information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations, writes @mattperich.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...

Neural population-based approaches have opened new windows into neural computations and behavior

Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with complex information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations.

www.thetransmitter.org

1 15 54

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Stephanie Naufel @snaufel.bsky.social · Jul 25

FUNDING OPPORTUNITY: Motor Learning and Neuromotor Ethics

Our Reality Labs EMG Foundational Research team is pleased to announce an RFP! The topic is on motor learning for EMG-based HCI and the related neuromotor ethics. Submissions are due September 1!

www.meta.com/blog/reality...

Request for Proposals: Motor Learning & Neuromotor Ethics | Meta Quest Blog

To foster innovation in this area, and to deepen our collaboration with academia, Reality Labs’ EMG Foundational Research team is pleased to invite faculty to submit their ideas to this request for re...

www.meta.com

11 14

Reposted by Olivier Codol

David Sussillo @sussillodavid.bsky.social · Jul 23

Open-sourced EMG data plus training/testing scripts to make contact with our results at 100 users for each three tasks (discrete gestures, 1D wrist navigation, and handwriting).

github.com/facebookrese...

1 4 37

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Jörn Diedrichsen @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social · Jul 21

Careful dissection of motor sequence learning by @andpru.bsky.social and @mkashefi.bsky.social. In my humble opinion this should be an instant classic 😏.

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Motor sequence learning involves better prediction of the next action and optimization of movement trajectories

Learning new sequential movements is a fundamental skill for many animals. Motor sequence learning may arise from three distinct processes: (1) improved execution of individual movements independent o...

www.jneurosci.org

1 11 39

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Amin Nejatbakhsh @aminejat.bsky.social · Jul 16

Pleased to announce that our paper on "Identifying Neural Dynamics Using Interventional State Space Models" has been selected for a poster presentation in #ICML2025. Please check the thread for paper details (0/n).

Presentation info: icml.cc/virtual/2025....

1 3 12

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Nature Neuroscience @natneuro.nature.com · Jul 2

Comment: The brain works at more than 10 bits per second

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The brain works at more than 10 bits per second - Nature Neuroscience

A recent article makes a claim with far-reaching implications for neuroscience, technology, and society: that the human brain is subject to an information processing ‘speed limit’ of 10 bits per secon...

www.nature.com

3 17

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · Jun 27

This paper had a big impact on me on this in admitting that maybe *some* amount of WM can be through synaptic plasticity not activity dynamics

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Intermittent rate coding and cue-specific ensembles support working memory - Nature

By recording large populations of neurons in behaving monkeys using newly developed silicon probes, we show that intermittent periods of memorandum-specific spiking coexist with synaptic mechanis...

www.nature.com

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Britton Sauerbrei @brittonsauerbrei.bsky.social · Jun 23

1/N
How do neural dynamics in motor cortex interact with those in subcortical networks to flexibly control movement? I’m beyond thrilled to share our work on this problem, led by Eric Kirk @eric-kirk.bsky.social with help from Kangjia Cai!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

3 22 69

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · Jun 23

Excited for this new step in your journey! Congrats!

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · Jun 20

Very interesting abstract! Looking forward to reading more. I also wonder how much your observations would change as we move to more evolutionary complex movements than locomotion, like grasping or tying shoe lace.

1 1

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · Jun 16

All the sensorimotor processing to make the production of speech happen. Ultimately the language produced may be much lower bound but the process of creating it can be arbitrarily more complex. Note that this involves asking what is the info channel here, is it btw indivs or brain-body within indiv

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · Jun 16

Sorry I mean more

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · Jun 16

An auditor is receiving maybe 10b/s. The speaker isn’t processing 10b/s at all.

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Andrew Pruszynski @andpru.bsky.social · Jun 10

Which classical monkey reaching studies do you want replicated/investigated at mass-Neuropixel scale?

5 4 9

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Ryan P. Badman @ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social · Jun 10

Our new preprint from Rajan lab (Harvard):

"Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments"

Sophisticated & sometimes insect-like planning, exploration, predator evasion, and foraging strategies by DRL.

arxiv.org/abs/2506.06981

Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments

Understanding the behavior of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents -- particularly as task and agent sophistication increase -- requires more than simple comparison of reward curves, yet standard ...

arxiv.org

2 11

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · Jun 5

Would have to be on temporal problems specifically (RNNs) since their purpose is to keep credit assignment temporally local. In RNNs vanishing gradients naturally achieve that. In RL I suspect gradients propagate for longer when used at all (more on that on our upcoming pre print update)

1 3

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Jonathan A. Michaels @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social · May 29

All our motor control modelling efforts focus on closed-loop systems for this reason:

"...closed-loop and open-loop training produce fundamentally different learning dynamics, even when using identical architectures and converging to the same final solution."

arxiv.org/abs/2505.13567

Learning Dynamics of RNNs in Closed-Loop Environments

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on neuroscience-inspired tasks offer powerful models of brain computation. However, typical training paradigms rely on open-loop, supervised settings, whereas ...

arxiv.org

5 22

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Jonathan A. Michaels @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social · May 28

A warning:

"Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time. It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems."

3 12 80

Reposted by Olivier Codol

Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · May 16

J'ai une question pour les francophones ici (ou n'importe qui si vous êtes bilingues):

C'est quoi la meilleure façon de dire « It was a humbling experience » ?

Il me semble qu'on n'a pas un mot qui est exactement équivalent à « humbling » en français...

3 1 4

Olivier Codol @oliviercodol.bsky.social · May 15

Is cognition a distinct step from action? Equivalently, is sensation a distinct step as well? Those are rhetorical questions of course, and I agree with the general sentiment of complete mind-environment loops