Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Charlotte Volk @charlottevolk.bsky.social · 8d

🚨 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

The curriculum effect in visual learning: the role of readout dimensionality

Generalization of visual perceptual learning (VPL) to unseen conditions varies across tasks. Previous work suggests that training curriculum may be integral to generalization, yet a theoretical explan...

tinyurl.com

1 22 69

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 26d

Congrats!

1

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Emilie Macé @mace-lab.bsky.social · 27d

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/

8 71 170

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

The Viking (Gunnar Blohm) @gunnarblohm.bsky.social · Aug 26

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...

2 11 67

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Aug 20

So many arguments boil down to "my semantic boundaries are slightly different than yours"

1

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Aug 20

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

What Emergence Can Possibly Mean

We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships b...

arxiv.org

3 4 23

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · Aug 16

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...

11 28 140

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Shahab Bakhtiari @shahabbakht.bsky.social · Jul 31

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.

2 8 39

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

katja heuer @k4tj4.bsky.social · Jul 27

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...

15 230 500

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Jul 30

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...

RFI: Neuroscience & the Path to Safe AGI

Safe Artificial General Intelligence through Neuroscience

blog.amaranth.foundation

1 5

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Marcus Ghosh @marcusghosh.bsky.social · Jul 25

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...

2 13 46

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Jul 15

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

LLM Daydreaming

Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.

gwern.net

1 6

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Marcelo Mattar @marcelomattar.bsky.social · Jul 2

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...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature

Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

doi.org

9 140 330

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Shrey Dixit @shreydixit.bsky.social · Jun 25

🚨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

Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Game-Theoretic Attribution of Function of Neural Units

Neural networks now generate text, images, and speech with billions of parameters, producing a need to know how each neural unit contributes to these high-dimensional outputs. Existing explainable-AI ...

arxiv.org

1 13 27

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · Jun 23

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. 🧵

61 48 410

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Jun 17

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.

2 4

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Jun 13

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

Compete in the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition | $50,000 Prize

Submit your essay for a chance to win $50,000 and be published by Berggruen Press. Explore fundamental questions and bridge cultural perspectives. Make your mark on the future of philosophy and cultur...

berggruen.org

6

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Jun 2

This is beautiful. Awe-inspiring science.

1 6

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Jun 2

Woo! Thanks for subscribing, all!

4

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · May 27

Very cool! However, the code link is broken.

1

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Janelia Research Campus @hhmijanelia.bsky.social · May 21

🪰 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

6 24

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Jennifer Hu @ COLM (recruiting PhDs and postdocs!) @jennhu.bsky.social · May 20

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)

Screenshot of Figure 1, which has two panels labeled (a) and (b). The caption states the following. Figure 1: Overview of our study. (a) Experiment 1: We explore whether forward passes show mechanistic signatures of competitor interference, first preferring a salient competing intuitive answer before preferring the correct answer. (b) Experiment 2: We systematically investigate the ability of dynamic measures derived from forward passes to predict indicators of processing load in humans.

2 15 52

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Yoshua Bengio @yoshuabengio.bsky.social · May 20

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...

The catastrophic risks of AI — and a safer path

Yoshua Bengio — the world's most-cited computer scientist and a "godfather" of artificial intelligence — is deadly concerned about the current trajectory of the technology. As AI models race toward fu...

www.ted.com

2 12 47

Reposted by Patrick Mineault

Ben Reinhardt @benjaminreinhardt.com · May 13

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/

1 4 7

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · May 15

arxiv.org/abs/2501.00663

Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time

Over more than a decade there has been an extensive research effort on how to effectively utilize recurrent models and attention. While recurrent models aim to compress the data into a fixed-size memo...

arxiv.org

7