Hsuan-Pei Huang
@pikapei.bsky.social
PhD student in Taiwan. He/him.
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
(Playing on www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...)
A call for more clarity around causality in neuroscience
In neuroscience, the term ‘causality’ is used to refer to different concepts, leading to confusion. Here we illustrate some of those variations, and w…
www.sciencedirect.com
November 29, 2025 at 2:47 PM
(Playing on www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...)
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
Flexible selection of working memory representations to reduce cognitive cost https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.28.691186v1
November 30, 2025 at 8:15 AM
Flexible selection of working memory representations to reduce cognitive cost https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.28.691186v1
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
The hippocampus is not a library, it is a simulation engine.
HPC is known for storing maps of the environment but not so known for generating planned trajectories.
This paper proposes that recurrence in CA3 is crucial for planning.
A🧵with my toy model and notes:
#neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI
HPC is known for storing maps of the environment but not so known for generating planned trajectories.
This paper proposes that recurrence in CA3 is crucial for planning.
A🧵with my toy model and notes:
#neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI
November 28, 2025 at 3:02 AM
The hippocampus is not a library, it is a simulation engine.
HPC is known for storing maps of the environment but not so known for generating planned trajectories.
This paper proposes that recurrence in CA3 is crucial for planning.
A🧵with my toy model and notes:
#neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI
HPC is known for storing maps of the environment but not so known for generating planned trajectories.
This paper proposes that recurrence in CA3 is crucial for planning.
A🧵with my toy model and notes:
#neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
One example of how multiplexing might be implemented in the brain was shown in the great work by Thomas Akam with Dmitri Kullmann, a decade ago.
The papers are cited well but the general multiplexing idea never really took the field by storm as much as it deserved
www.nature.com/articles/nrn...
The papers are cited well but the general multiplexing idea never really took the field by storm as much as it deserved
www.nature.com/articles/nrn...
November 24, 2025 at 10:07 AM
One example of how multiplexing might be implemented in the brain was shown in the great work by Thomas Akam with Dmitri Kullmann, a decade ago.
The papers are cited well but the general multiplexing idea never really took the field by storm as much as it deserved
www.nature.com/articles/nrn...
The papers are cited well but the general multiplexing idea never really took the field by storm as much as it deserved
www.nature.com/articles/nrn...
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
There are a small number of papers that I still think about regularly 10 years after reading them and this is one of them.
Izbikevich also had an extremely cool, wild, and thought-provoking model of how this might work that I feel never really got fully fleshed out.
www.izhikevich.org/publications...
www.izhikevich.org/publications...
www.izhikevich.org
November 24, 2025 at 1:54 PM
There are a small number of papers that I still think about regularly 10 years after reading them and this is one of them.
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
Thrilled that my recent paper, Hippocampal Ripples during Offline Periods Predict Human Motor Sequence Learning, was selected for the “This Week in The Journal” highlight! 🤩
Huge thanks to @bstaresina.bsky.social and our collaborators who made this work possible!
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
#JNeurosci
Huge thanks to @bstaresina.bsky.social and our collaborators who made this work possible!
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
#JNeurosci
November 24, 2025 at 2:52 PM
Thrilled that my recent paper, Hippocampal Ripples during Offline Periods Predict Human Motor Sequence Learning, was selected for the “This Week in The Journal” highlight! 🤩
Huge thanks to @bstaresina.bsky.social and our collaborators who made this work possible!
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
#JNeurosci
Huge thanks to @bstaresina.bsky.social and our collaborators who made this work possible!
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
#JNeurosci
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
I think there will be tools that are better or worse at "carving nature at its joints" to help us find the simplest way to capture most of what we care about. I'm saying (eg, here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) that we should try some empirical methods to get a handle on what those tools are
Testing methods of neural systems understanding
Neuroscientists apply a range of analysis tools to recorded neural activity in order to glean insights into how neural circuits drive behavior in orga…
www.sciencedirect.com
November 24, 2025 at 4:01 PM
I think there will be tools that are better or worse at "carving nature at its joints" to help us find the simplest way to capture most of what we care about. I'm saying (eg, here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) that we should try some empirical methods to get a handle on what those tools are
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
This kind of stuff is why I say that I worry that the tools of neuroscience are not properly vetted
“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”
Neural dynamics outside task-coding dimensions drive decision trajectories through transient amplification
Most behaviors involve neural dynamics in high-dimensional activity spaces. A common approach is to extract dimensions that capture task-related variability, such as those separating stimuli or choice...
www.biorxiv.org
November 23, 2025 at 3:02 PM
This kind of stuff is why I say that I worry that the tools of neuroscience are not properly vetted
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
This one is an all time favorite of mine:
direct.mit.edu/neco/article...
(tho maybe not that relevant to the "rescue" thing)
direct.mit.edu/neco/article...
(tho maybe not that relevant to the "rescue" thing)
Natural Gradient Works Efficiently in Learning
Abstract. When a parameter space has a certain underlying structure, the ordinary gradient of a function does not represent its steepest direction, but the natural gradient does. Information geometry ...
direct.mit.edu
November 24, 2025 at 4:23 PM
This one is an all time favorite of mine:
direct.mit.edu/neco/article...
(tho maybe not that relevant to the "rescue" thing)
direct.mit.edu/neco/article...
(tho maybe not that relevant to the "rescue" thing)
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
📍Excited to share that our paper was selected as a Spotlight at #NeurIPS2025!
arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03972
It started from a question I kept running into:
When do RNNs trained on the same task converge/diverge in their solutions?
🧵⬇️
arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03972
It started from a question I kept running into:
When do RNNs trained on the same task converge/diverge in their solutions?
🧵⬇️
November 24, 2025 at 4:43 PM
📍Excited to share that our paper was selected as a Spotlight at #NeurIPS2025!
arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03972
It started from a question I kept running into:
When do RNNs trained on the same task converge/diverge in their solutions?
🧵⬇️
arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03972
It started from a question I kept running into:
When do RNNs trained on the same task converge/diverge in their solutions?
🧵⬇️
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way.
We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere:
This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA
It’s quite the opposite!
(thread)
We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere:
This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA
It’s quite the opposite!
(thread)
“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”
Neural dynamics outside task-coding dimensions drive decision trajectories through transient amplification
Most behaviors involve neural dynamics in high-dimensional activity spaces. A common approach is to extract dimensions that capture task-related variability, such as those separating stimuli or choice...
www.biorxiv.org
November 25, 2025 at 4:16 PM
Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way.
We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere:
This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA
It’s quite the opposite!
(thread)
We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere:
This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA
It’s quite the opposite!
(thread)
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”
Neural dynamics outside task-coding dimensions drive decision trajectories through transient amplification
Most behaviors involve neural dynamics in high-dimensional activity spaces. A common approach is to extract dimensions that capture task-related variability, such as those separating stimuli or choice...
www.biorxiv.org
November 23, 2025 at 1:38 PM
“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
In the context of the recent discussions on travelling waves and oscillations in 🧠, the recent direction of work on ANNs by Keller, Welling et al is my favorite:
arxiv.org/abs/2409.13669
Focusing on the advantages of travelling waves for equivariant representations and conserving symmetries.
arxiv.org/abs/2409.13669
Focusing on the advantages of travelling waves for equivariant representations and conserving symmetries.
A Spacetime Perspective on Dynamical Computation in Neural Information Processing Systems
There is now substantial evidence for traveling waves and other structured spatiotemporal recurrent neural dynamics in cortical structures; but these observations have typically been difficult to reco...
arxiv.org
November 25, 2025 at 6:49 PM
In the context of the recent discussions on travelling waves and oscillations in 🧠, the recent direction of work on ANNs by Keller, Welling et al is my favorite:
arxiv.org/abs/2409.13669
Focusing on the advantages of travelling waves for equivariant representations and conserving symmetries.
arxiv.org/abs/2409.13669
Focusing on the advantages of travelling waves for equivariant representations and conserving symmetries.
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
I am really proud that eLife have published this paper. It is a very nice paper, but you need to also read the reviews to understand why! 1/n
"The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition". Intuitive cell types are found in random artificial networks using the same selection criteria neuroscientists use with actual data. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 1/2
elifesciences.org
November 25, 2025 at 8:34 PM
I am really proud that eLife have published this paper. It is a very nice paper, but you need to also read the reviews to understand why! 1/n
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...
How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world - Nature Reviews Psychology
Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...
www.nature.com
November 24, 2025 at 11:14 PM
New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
Just in time for Thanksgiving!
Here is my (very) short commentary titled "On the role of theories in consciousness science" published now in
@commspsychol.nature.com :
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Here is my (very) short commentary titled "On the role of theories in consciousness science" published now in
@commspsychol.nature.com :
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
On the role of theories in consciousness science - Communications Psychology
Consciousness Science is entering an age of unprecedented opportunity, thanks to recent empirical and theoretical advances, increasing interest in the topic, and technological advances in neuroscience...
www.nature.com
November 26, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Just in time for Thanksgiving!
Here is my (very) short commentary titled "On the role of theories in consciousness science" published now in
@commspsychol.nature.com :
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Here is my (very) short commentary titled "On the role of theories in consciousness science" published now in
@commspsychol.nature.com :
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
Come on Konrad, why do you cave so easily? Here, let me try it for you:
1. Spikes are (to good approximation) the only events that matter.
2. Extracellular fields are one way by which spikes interact with each other.
1/2
1. Spikes are (to good approximation) the only events that matter.
2. Extracellular fields are one way by which spikes interact with each other.
1/2
As we are having a discussion on neural codes: @earlkmiller.bsky.social is entirely right that the "only spike rates matter" idea that is so prominent in neuroscience has no credible evidence. We simply do not currently know how neurons code relevant information. Oscillations are likely part of it.
November 21, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Come on Konrad, why do you cave so easily? Here, let me try it for you:
1. Spikes are (to good approximation) the only events that matter.
2. Extracellular fields are one way by which spikes interact with each other.
1/2
1. Spikes are (to good approximation) the only events that matter.
2. Extracellular fields are one way by which spikes interact with each other.
1/2
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
1. New preprint resolving a conundrum in systems neuroscience with an AI scientist, and humans Reilly Tilbury, Dabin Kwon, @haydari.bsky.social, @jacobmratliff.bsky.social, @bio-emergent.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net, @kevinjmiller.bsky.social, @neurokim.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Characterizing neuronal population geometry with AI equation discovery
The visual cortex contains millions of neurons, whose combined activity forms a population code representing visual stimuli. There is, however, a discrepancy between our understanding of this code at ...
www.biorxiv.org
November 14, 2025 at 6:07 PM
1. New preprint resolving a conundrum in systems neuroscience with an AI scientist, and humans Reilly Tilbury, Dabin Kwon, @haydari.bsky.social, @jacobmratliff.bsky.social, @bio-emergent.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net, @kevinjmiller.bsky.social, @neurokim.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
New preprint alert!
Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations
#psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪
Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations
#psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪
OSF
osf.io
November 26, 2025 at 6:11 PM
New preprint alert!
Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations
#psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪
Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations
#psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social
November 27, 2025 at 8:24 AM
1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
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).
November 19, 2025 at 4:14 PM
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).
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
I think almost all scientific projects should be planned carefully. And I think an app can dramatically improve that. So I wrote an app for that (free for now, if you can fund this let me know). I tested it quite a bit (>8000 users in beta so far). try it: planyourscience.com
November 20, 2025 at 3:33 PM
I think almost all scientific projects should be planned carefully. And I think an app can dramatically improve that. So I wrote an app for that (free for now, if you can fund this let me know). I tested it quite a bit (>8000 users in beta so far). try it: planyourscience.com
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
BTSP in V1
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Plateau potentials are instructive signals for behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity in the neocortex
Learning occurs via the adjustment of synaptic weights across a variety of timescales. The mechanisms supporting these processes, from single-shot to iterative learning, are unclear. The prevailing mo...
www.biorxiv.org
November 20, 2025 at 11:50 PM
BTSP in V1
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Hsuan-Pei Huang
Hippocampal sequences traverse a memory space https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.21.689701v1
November 22, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Hippocampal sequences traverse a memory space https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.21.689701v1