Dota Tianai Dong

@dotadotadota.bsky.social

Phd student at @MPI_NL@Donders, working on language and interaction in 🖥️ and 👶🧠 https://tianaidong.github.io/

This review began with the great Peter Hagoort asking after one of my talks: "What have we actually learned about the brain from brain–DNN comparisons?" 🔥 So eye-opening to survey NeuroAI work across vision and language--many questions have been answered in one field but remain open in the other!

Dota Tianai Dong@dotadotadota.bsky.social · 2w ago

1/5 Over a decade of comparing deep neural networks to the human brain—but what have we actually learned? Our new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Feature Review synthesizes a decade of brain–DNN comparisons, asking what they reveal about brain function across vision and language.

I’ll be presenting at 9:30 AM PST in Oral Session D: Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics 2 at #ACL2026! Come say hi! 👋 And stay tuned for more of our work exploring language and language models in interactive worlds. 🚀

Dota Tianai Dong@dotadotadota.bsky.social · last mo.

Check out our #ACL2026 Oral paper 🗣️🤖 How do MLMs ground word usage through interactions with the physical and social world? Taking a classical human communication paradigm, we compare 7 MLMs with humans. doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.84

(1/n) Thrilled to share my first paper at Meta FAIR! "EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data" 👶 Human infants learn language from sparse, noisy multimodal input. Today's VLMs can't. We built a benchmark + challenge to close that gap. 🧵

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Good morning #ICLR2026 ☀️ The Re-Align workshop kicks off in under an hour! A full day on what we can actually do with representational alignment, from brains to language models to agents. Schedule in the thread 👇

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Children exhibit visual understanding from limited experience, orders of magnitude less than our best models. We introduce the Zero-shot World Model (ZWM). Trained on a single child's visual experience, BabyZWM rapidly generates competence across diverse benchmarks with no task-specific training. 🧵

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Missed the Re-Align hackathon at ICLR or CCN 2025 — or want more? 🙂 Re-Align is back at ICLR 2026 🚀 Beyond the paper track, we’re launching a persistent shared-task challenge + challenge paper track. Can’t wait to see your creative & critical takes on representational alignment 🔥🥳

Badr AlKhamissi@bkhmsi.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🎉 Re-Align is back for its 4th edition at ICLR 2026! 📣 We invite submissions on representational alignment, spanning ML, Neuroscience, CogSci, and related fields. 📝 Tracks: Short (≤5p), Long (≤10p), Challenge (blog) ⏰ Deadline: Feb 5, 2026 for papers 🔗 representational-alignment.github.io/2026/

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language. tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬 1/n

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So excited and honored to receive an ERC Starting Grant for the project BrainAlign!! BrainAlign will bring LLMs closer to human understanding by directly aligning them with the human brain. Stay tuned for our findings, and multiple postdoc and PhD openings in the coming years!

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I’m recruiting committee members for the Technical Program Committee at #CCN2026. Please apply if you want to help make submission, review & selection of contributed work (Extended Abstracts & Proceedings) more useful for everyone! 🌐 Helps to have: programming/communications/editorial experience.

Grace Lindsay@neurograce.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Fill out the form here to be involved in #CCN2026 tinyurl.com/ccn26committee And definitely fill out the #CCN2025 feedback form! tinyurl.com/ccn25partici...

Somewhat exhausted but very happily and proudly looking back at #CCN2025 & ready to pass the torch to NEW Amsterdam for #CCN2026 🥳Please fill out the survey 👇 to give input to the organizing team led by @neurograce.bsky.social and @toddgureckis.bsky.social @NYU!

Grace Lindsay@neurograce.bsky.social · 12mo ago

The rumors are true! #CCN2026 will be held at NYU. @toddgureckis.bsky.social and I will be executive-chairing. Get in touch if you want to be involved!

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

This year, we're organizing travel and caregiver awards to help make CCN 2025 more accessible for those who might otherwise find it difficult to attend. If this kind of support would make a difference for you—or someone you know—we’d love for you to apply or pass the word along 🙌

CogCompNeuro@cogcompneuro.bsky.social · last yr.

Joining us for CCN2025 in Amsterdam? Early registration discount is still available until the 23rd May! 2025.ccneuro.org/meeting-regi... Need financial support? We got travel awards & caregiver grants available: 2025.ccneuro.org/travel-awards/ 2025.ccneuro.org/caregiver-aw...