Armin Bazarjani

@arminbazza.bsky.social

PhD Student at USC studying how biological and artificial brains construct flexible and reusable representations of the world arminbazza.github.io

I am happy to share some good news: my lab has received an NSF CAREER award and an NIH R01 this summer, supporting our work on how the brain handles uncertainty during learning. We will be hiring postdocs and PhD students in the coming year, so please get by email in touch if you are interested.

News! I've joined the Astera Institute to lead its neuroscience based AGI research. Backed by $1B+ commitment over the coming decade, my team will explore novel, brain-inspired architectures and algos toward safe, efficient human-like AGI, working alongside Doris Tsao. 1/ astera.org/dileep-georg...

Dileep George joins Astera to lead its neuro-inspired AGI effort

Dileep George is joining Astera as Head of AI, leading our AGI research division. Working alongside our Chief Scientist Doris Tsao, he and the team will explore novel, brain-inspired computational arc...

astera.org

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions rdcu.be/eRVUk

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces

Nature - The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

rdcu.be

New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex. rdcu.be/eAofi

Reconciling flexibility and efficiency: medial entorhinal cortex represents a compositional cognitive map

Nature Communications - How the brain creates compositional cognitive maps that support both flexible and efficient planning remains poorly understood. Here, authors propose a...

rdcu.be

RFK Jr. just fired thousands of federal workers at crucial health agencies, including the FDA, CDC, and NIH. These are the people who inspect our food, track infectious diseases, and research life-saving treatments and cures. How is this "Making America Healthy Again"?

Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

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new paper from a collaborative endeavor! (@co0p3r.bsky.social) we find & replicate food-reward biases in a reinforcement learning task (where food stim are incidental) people with eating disorder symptoms show a low-calorie food bias while those without show a high-calorie food bias... (1/3)

Eating disorder symptoms and emotional arousal modulate food biases during reward learning in females - Nature Communications

Disordered eating can disrupt the rewarding value of food. Here, the authors show in a female sample that eating disorder symptoms, emotional arousal, and interoceptive awareness modulate goal-ir...

nature.com

Please share: I have a friend with access to food trucks in LA that is looking for locations to set them up this weekend that will be useful to the largest number of people and will allow a food truck to park there. Not looking for suggestions but actual contacts