(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. 🧵

We recently investigated how humans and AI reason through causal rules: arxiv.org/abs/2606.06464 Accepted at #CogSci2026. We gave adults and LLMs agency to actively experiment using a Blicket causal game, breaking down their process into the iterative loop shown in the following figure:

1/ Check out our new modeling paper on predictive learning in the hippocampus! 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A central idea in neuroscience is that the brain makes sense of the world by learning to predict its environment 🧠➡️🌍.

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

Hopeless in Tehran

Essays on neuroscience

rezashadmehr.blogspot.com

The revised version of our paper on the impact of top-down feedback is now out @elife.bsky.social: doi.org/10.7554/eLif... tl;dr: we show that using human-brain-like feedback/anatomy in a deep RNN leads to human-like visual biases! This work was led by @tmshbr.bsky.social #NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪

I’m grateful to share that our paper has been published in Nature. This work formed the core of my PhD research at McGill University. We show that hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward progressively reorganize to reflect predictive representations of reward during learning.

Nature@nature.com · 7mo ago

Nature research paper: Predictive coding of reward in the hippocampus go.nature.com/49mB13V

Our paper on the "Oneirogen hypothesis" is now up in its revised form on eLife! This is the hypothesis that psychedelics induce a dream-like state, which we show via modelling could explain a variety of perceptual and learning effects from such drugs. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 🧠📈 🧪

Are you thinking about doing neuroscience outreach but want to make it more exciting or hands on? Check out RetINaBox! (A collab led by the Trenholm lab) We tried to bring the experience of experimental neuroscience to a classroom setting: www.eneuro.org/content/13/1... #neuroscience 🧪

RetINaBox: A Hands-On Learning Tool for Experimental Neuroscience

An exciting aspect of neuroscience is developing and testing hypotheses via experimentation. However, due to logistical and financial hurdles, the experiment and discovery component of neuroscience is...

eneuro.org

🚨 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

🧠🤖 Computational Neuroscience summer school IMBIZO in Cape Town is open for applications again!   💻🧬 3 weeks of intense coursework & projects with support from expert tutors and faculty   📈Apply until July 1st! 🔗https://imbizo.africa/

Want to spend 3 weeks in South Africa for an unforgettable summer school experience? Imbizo 2026 (imbizo.africa) student applications are OPEN! Lectures, new friends, and Noordhoek beach await. Apply by July 1! More info and apply: imbizo.africa/apply/ #Imbizo2026 #CompNeuro

Top-down feedback is ubiquitous in the brain and computationally distinct, but rarely modeled in deep neural networks. What happens when a DNN has biologically-inspired top-down feedback? 🧠📈 Our new paper explores this: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Excited to share our new pre-print on bioRxiv, in which we reveal that feedback-driven motor corrections are encoded in small, previously missed neural signals.

Are you training self-supervised/foundation models, and worried if they are learning good representations? We got you covered! 💪 🦖Introducing Reptrix, a #Python library to evaluate representation quality metrics for neural nets: github.com/BARL-SSL/rep... 🧵👇[1/6] #DeepLearning

At #Cosyne2025? Come by my poster today (3-047) to hear how sequential predictive learning produces a continuous neural manifold with the ability to generate replay during sleep, and spatial representations that "sweep" ahead to future positions. All from sensory information alone!

Very excited for the upcoming Cosyne in Montreal! I’ll be presenting my poster [2-126] Brain-like neural dynamics for behavioral control develop through reinforcement learning, on the Friday session at 13:15. Feel free to drop by! The related pre-print is also out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Brain-like neural dynamics for behavioral control develop through reinforcement learning

During development, neural circuits are shaped continuously as we learn to control our bodies. The ultimate goal of this process is to produce neural dynamics that enable the rich repertoire of behavi...

biorxiv.org

📢 We have a new #NeuroAI postdoctoral position in the lab! If you have a strong background in #NeuroAI or computational neuroscience, I’d love to hear from you. (Repost please) 🧠📈🤖

The problem with current SSL? It's hungry. Very hungry. 🤖 Training time: Weeks Dataset size: Millions of images Compute costs: 💸💸💸 Our #NeurIPS2024 poster makes SSL pipelines 2x faster and achieves similar accuracy at 50% pretraining cost! 💪🏼✨ 🧵 1/8

Why does #compneuro need new learning methods? ANN models are usually trained with Gradient Descent (GD), which violates biological realities like Dale’s law and log-normal weights. Here we describe a superior learning algorithm for comp neuro: Exponentiated Gradients (EG)! 1/12 #neuroscience 🧪

Jonathan Cornford@repromancer.bsky.social · 2y ago

Brain-like learning with exponentiated gradients www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1. Hi all: I’m here to advertise our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1..., with Fabrice Normandin, @tyrellturing.bsky.social, and @glajoie.bsky.social!

The oneirogen hypothesis: modeling the hallucinatory effects of classical psychedelics in terms of replay-dependent plasticity mechanisms

Classical psychedelics induce complex visual hallucinations in humans, generating percepts that are coherent at a low level, but which have surreal, dream-like qualities at a high level. While there a...

biorxiv.org