What Makes Linguistic Representations Good Models of High-Level Visual Perception in the Human Brain? This question underlies the study presented in our new preprint. We trained brain-encoding models to predict fMRI responses to naturalistic images from LLM-derived embeddings of image captions.
Anna Bavaresco
@annabavaresco.bsky.social
PhD student at the University of Amsterdam working on vision-language models and cognitive computational neuroscience
🍃2nd Call for Papers!😊 EMNLP 2026 Workshop on Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue (MINT) welcomes work on multimodal communication, speech, gesture, gaze, facial expressions, datasets, eval methods, and applications! @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social mintworkshop.github.io
Redirecting…
mintworkshop.github.io
It was great to attend EACL2026 in Rabat!🇲🇦 I've learnt a few interesting things about Arabic, seen a friend receive a well-deserved Outstanding Paper Award (kudos @alberto-testoni.bsky.social), and had stimulating conversations with amazing researchers✨
📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging Deadline March 20 Please RT 🙏 👇 mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language
The submission deadline for CMCL is coming up in less than a month! (Feb 25) CMCL will be co-located with LREC and take place on May 16!🌴https://sites.google.com/view/cmclworkshop/cfp
Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) workshop will be co-located with LREC 2026 in Palma, Mallorca!🌴Stay tuned for more details!✨ @byungdoh.bsky.social Tatsuki Kuribayashi @grambelli.bsky.social Philipp Wicke, Jixing Li, Ryo Yoshida @cmclworkshop.bsky.social
Does it matter how you prompt an LLM with a persona? Do LLMs respond differently to natural conversation history compared to names and explicit mentions? Go check out our new preprint! 👀
Even with identical sociodemographic info, how LLMs are given it changes downstream bias results. Our new preprint (w/ @veraneplenbroek.bsky.social, Jan Batzner & Sebastian Padó) tests cues with varying external validity across 10 personas, 4 tasks & 7 LLMs: arxiv.org/abs/2601.18572
🚀 Call for Papers! The 9th Multimodal Learning and Applications Workshop (MULA 2026) is coming to CVPR 2026. If you’re working on multimodal learning, this is your stage! 🗓️ Submission deadline: March 9, 2026 (AoE) More information ➡️ mula-workshop.github.io
Our paper has been accepted to EACL 2026!🎉 We systematically evaluate several vision-language (VLMs) and language-only models, measuring their alignment with brain responses to concept words. Our results show that vision-language models offer a promising tool to model human concept processing
I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15). werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
Vacancy — PhD Position in NeuroAI for Video Perception in the Human Brain
<p><span>Are you interested in using AI to unravel the mysteries of the brain? Do you want to perform cutting-edge NeuroAI research and leverage deep learning to understand human vision? Then check out the vacancy below and apply for a PhD position in this exciting research direction.</span></p>
werkenbij.uva.nl
The CfP for CMCL is out!🌴 We are looking forward to receiving many interesting submissions! ✨ (Deadline: February 25, 2026) sites.google.com/view/cmclwor...
scholar.google.com
Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) workshop will be co-located with LREC 2026 in Palma, Mallorca!🌴Stay tuned for more details!✨ @byungdoh.bsky.social Tatsuki Kuribayashi @grambelli.bsky.social Philipp Wicke, Jixing Li, Ryo Yoshida @cmclworkshop.bsky.social
@annabavaresco.bsky.social and @tlmnhut.bsky.social show: supervised pruning of a DNN’s feature space better aligns with human category representations, selects distinct subspaces for different categories, and more accurately predicts people’s preferences for GenAI images. doi.org/10.1145/3768...
Modeling Human Concepts with Subspaces in Deep Vision Models | ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
Improving the modeling of human representations of everyday semantic categories, such as animals or food, can lead to better alignment between AI systems and humans. Humans are thought to represent su...
doi.org
✨ Do self-supervised speech models learn to encode language-specific linguistic features from their training data, or only more language-general acoustic correlates? At #Interspeech2025 we presented our new Wav2Vec2-NL model and SSL-NL evaluation dataset to test this! 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2506.00981 ⬇️
Had such a great time presenting our tutorial on Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models at #Interspeech2025! 🔍 For anyone looking for an introduction to the topic, we've now uploaded all materials to the website: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter...
Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models — Tutorial @ Interspeech 2025
interpretingdl.github.io
And that's the whole team behind the tutorial on interpretability techniques for speech models at IS2025.
What a privilege to have #CCN2025 in (an exceptionally warm and sunny) Amsterdam this year! It was my first time attending the conference, and being surrounded by so many talented researchers whose interests are similar to mine has been a deeply enriching experience ✨