Patrick Mineault

What I would have done for a dataset like this to exist in grad school! One day, we'll figure out the dorsal stream. openreview.net/forum?id=Ila...

a man in a suit and tie says you stay classy san diego in front of a channel 4 news team ALT: a man in a suit and tie says you stay classy san diego in front of a channel 4 news team

Headed to NeurIPS, looking forward to catching up with you about NeuroAI, foundation models of the brain, AI safety and AI for science

This equivocation of oscillations and continual learning is a bit of stretch... I'm surprised they didn't get dinged by the reviewers for neuro-babble. openreview.net/forum?id=nbM...

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).

New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)

iPad + Apple Pencil + Concepts

I had way too much fun making these diagrams. Sure, it's not as legible as if I had typed out the text; but I feel like these have a bit more personality

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...

🚨 New preprint alert!

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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.
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A 🧵:

tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3

Congrats!

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨

We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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Having fun facilitating this amazing group of young Profs at the #Neuro4Pros workshop with @kordinglab.bsky.social and @meganakpeters.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and Hannah Bayer.

Watch out world: this is the next generation of leaders!

compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...

So many arguments boil down to "my semantic boundaries are slightly different than yours"

What Emergence Can Possibly Mean We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships b...

"Everyone agrees that emergence is important, but they don’t agree on what the word should mean" arxiv.org/abs/2410.15468

𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻
by Earl K Miller, Scott L Brincat, Jefferson E Roy
This promises to be a must read
One day we should create an online journal club to just read these kinds of papers!
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

A few years ago, with @tyrellturing.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social and others, we showed one single objective (prediction) was sufficient for explaining specialized pathways of mouse visual cortex: tinyurl.com/2vsjbve7

Super cool to see the same observation now for human visual cortex.

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

RFI: Neuroscience & the Path to Safe AGI Safe Artificial General Intelligence through Neuroscience

RFI: How can brain science shape frontier-scale AGI? The Amaranth Foundation wants your 2-page ideas on how brain science can guide & govern frontier-scale AGI—incl. short-timeline (2025-2028) scenarios. Send ≤2-page ideas by 29 Aug. Link: blog.amaranth.foundation/p/rfi-neuros...

How can we best use AI in science?

Myself and 9 other research fellows from @imperial-ix.bsky.social use AI methods in domains from plant biology (🌱) to neuroscience (🧠) and particle physics (🎇).

Together we suggest 10 simple rules @plos.org 🧵

doi.org/10.1371/jour...

LLM Daydreaming Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.

Curious what cognitive scientists think about this daydreaming proposal from Gwern: gwern.net/ai-daydreaming

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Game-Theoretic Attribution of Function of Neural Units Neural networks now generate text, images, and speech with billions of parameters, producing a need to know how each neural unit contributes to these high-dimensional outputs. Existing explainable-AI ...

🚨Preprint Alert: Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Contribution of Neural Units using Game Theory: arxiv.org/abs/2506.19732
The result of my MSc thesis is out with @kayson.bsky.social @fatemehhadaeghi.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social @kordinglab.bsky.social, Claus C. Hilgetag

Thrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall!

My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵

Does anybody have a good review or blog post on advances in neurosymbolic and program induction methods over the last 2 years? I'm looking for something technical that has the depth of explanation I would expect from, say, Lil' Log. My usual tools have failed me.

Compete in the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition | $50,000 Prize Submit your essay for a chance to win $50,000 and be published by Berggruen Press. Explore fundamental questions and bridge cultural perspectives. Make your mark on the future of philosophy and cultur...

A $50k essay competition about consciousness... Any takers? Via @erikhoel.blogsky.venki.dev berggruen.org/essay-compet...

This is beautiful. Awe-inspiring science.

Woo! Thanks for subscribing, all!

Very cool! However, the code link is broken.

🪰 A team of Janelia researchers & collaborators have created a new set of tools for studying motor control of wing movements in fruit flies, providing an important #openscience resource for future studies of fly flight & courtship 🧠
hhmi.news/3H3ohn8

Screenshot of Figure 1, which has two panels labeled (a) and (b). The caption states the following. Figure 1: Overview of our study. (a) Experiment 1: We explore whether forward passes show mechanistic signatures of competitor interference, first preferring a salient competing intuitive answer before preferring the correct answer. (b) Experiment 2: We systematically investigate the ability of dynamic measures derived from forward passes to predict indicators of processing load in humans.

Excited to share a new preprint w/ @michael-lepori.bsky.social & Michael Franke!

A dominant approach in AI/cogsci uses *outputs* from AI models (eg logprobs) to predict human behavior.

But how does model *processing* (across layers in a forward pass) relate to human real-time processing? 👇 (1/12)

The catastrophic risks of AI — and a safer path Yoshua Bengio — the world's most-cited computer scientist and a "godfather" of artificial intelligence — is deadly concerned about the current trajectory of the technology. As AI models race toward fu...

When I realized how dangerous the current agency-driven AI trajectory could be for future generations, I knew I had to do all I could to make AI safer. I recently shared this personal experience, and outlined the scientific solution I envision @TEDTalks⤵️
www.ted.com/talks/yoshua...