Marius Schneider

On a Thursday your best bet is probably Silbergold or Pracht

Congrats!! & welcome to one of the best cities ;)

Bet: this flavor of same-stimulus, same-task, compare-behavior, compare-physiology is the future of model testing and theory development in neuroscience.

Thanks to the whole team behind Mouse vs AI:
@jingpeng.bsky.social , Yuchen Hou, Joe Canzano, @spencerlaveresmith.bsky.social & @mbeyeler.bsky.social !

A special shout-out to Joe, who designed the Unity task, trained the mice, and recorded the neural data — making this benchmark possible!

Submit your model. Compete against mice.
Which model architectures solve the task, and which find brain-like solutions?
Let us uncover what it takes to build robust, biologically inspired agents!
Read the whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446
Explore the challenge: robustforaging.github.io

Participants submit models trained only on robust foraging. We then regress from their model activations onto SOTA mesoscale population scale recordings including all mouse visual areas at once. This let us test whether brain-like codes emerge naturally from behavior-driven learning

🧠 Track 2: Neural Alignment

Do task-trained agents develop brain-like internal representations?

We regress model activations onto 19k+ neurons across all mouse visual areas recorded during the same task.

This lets us test whether brain-like codes emerge naturally from behavior-driven learning.

Track 1 tests generalization to unseen visual perturbations and ranks models based on how well they generalize (perform under these unseen perturbations)

🧭Track 1: Visual Robustness

Track 1 evaluates how well RL agents generalize to unseen visual perturbations, like different weather or lighting changes, while performing a foraging task.

Mice perform the same task in VR—enabling direct behavioral comparisons across species.

train mouse and AI on shared foraging task

We built a naturalistic Unity world (not blocky or toy-like) and trained mice to perform a foraging task in it.

Now it’s your turn: train RL agents on the same task and submit your model!

Mouse vs. AI: A Neuroethological Benchmark for Visual Robustness and Neural Alignment Visual robustness under real-world conditions remains a critical bottleneck for modern reinforcement learning agents. In contrast, biological systems such as mice show remarkable resilience to environ...

🚨Our NeurIPS 2025 competition Mouse vs. AI is LIVE!

We combine a visual navigation task + large-scale mouse neural data to test what makes visual RL agents robust and brain-like.

Top teams: featured at NeurIPS + co-author our summary paper. Join the challenge!

Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446

An illustration of a mouse on a ball looking at a field of grass displayed on monitors.

Can your AI beat a mouse?

Mice still outperform our best computing machines in some ways. One way is robust visual processing.

10 years ago I decided to work on HARD behavior driven by COMPLEX visual processing. And that risk is paying off now. #neuroAI 1/n

Here is your last reminder that the application deadline for Imbizo.Africa is nearing quickly, the 1st of July, in fact tomorrow. Still the place where diversity is at its best in the world! Tell all who need to hear. #africa #neuro

Inferring internal states across mice and monkeys using facial features - Nature Communications Here, the authors created a virtual reality task for monkeys and mice to explore if internal states like attention are similar across species. Their facial expressions during the task were similar, su...

Now out in @natcomms.nature.com‬: Mice and monkeys spontaneously shift through comparable cognitive states - and it's written all over their faces! (1/7)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A Brief History of Young People Today Don't Want to Work

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Highly recommended for all neuroscientists who want to learn more about computational neuroscience in a supportive community!

Re-posting is appreciated: We have a fully funded PhD position in CMC lab @cmc-lab.bsky.social (at @tudresden_de). You can use forms.gle/qiAv5NZ871kv... to send your application and find more information. Deadline is April 30. Find more about CMC lab: cmclab.org and email me if you have questions.

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...

Foundation model of neural activity predicts response to new stimulus types - Nature A foundation model trained on neural activity of visual cortex from multiple mice accurately predicts responses to video stimuli and cell types, dendritic features and connectivity within the MICrONS ...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Firing rates in visual cortex show representational drift, while temporal spike sequences remain stable Neural firing-rate responses to sensory stimuli show progressive changes both within and across sessions, raising the question of how the brain mainta…

Firing rates in visual cortex show representational drift, while temporal spike sequences remain stable

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Great work by Boris Sotomayor and with @battaglialab.bsky.social

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.

Excited for the poster session at #Cosyne tonight!
Come check out the two posters I am involved in—one on neural representations and generalization in mice & RL agents trained on the same foraging task, and another on selective attention in spiking networks.

Party poster for dance party on final night of Cosyne 2025 workshops. It will take place April 1st, 2025, 10PM to 3AM at Le P'tit Caribou.

Coming to the #Cosyne2025 workshops? Wanna dance on the final night? We got you covered.

@glajoie.bsky.social and I have organized a party in Tremblant. Come and get on the dance floor y'all. 🕺

April 1st
10PM-3AM
Location: Le P'tit Caribou

DJs Mat Moebius, Xanarelle, and Prosocial

Please share!

🧵 time!
1/15
Why are CNNs so good at predicting neural responses in the primate visual system? Is it their design (architecture) or learning (training)? And does this change along the visual hierarchy?
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Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Distinct roles of PV and Sst interneurons in visually induced gamma oscillations Gamma-frequency oscillations are a hallmark of active information processing and are generated by interactions between excitatory and inhibitory neuro…

Happy to see this study led by Irene Onorato finally out - we show distinct phase locking and spike timing of optotagged PV cells and Sst interneuron subtypes during gamma oscillations in mouse visual cortex, suggesting an update to the classic PING model www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨Preprint Alert

New work with @martinavinck.bsky.social

We elucidate the architectural bias that enables CNNs to predict early visual cortex responses in macaques and humans even without optimization of convolutional kernels.

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Spiros Chavlis and I are very excited to share our latest #dendritic ANN research published in Nature Comms. @natureportfolio.bsky.social. We show that adopting the structure and sparse sampling features of biological #dendrites makes ANNs accurate, highly efficient and robust to overfitting.

It’s shocking how much they’ve all decided to bow down and kiss the ring. Certainly, it has made it clear that if things get really bad, they will do nothing other than protect their own financial interests.

Dynamics of specialization in neural modules under resource constraints - Nature Communications The extent to which structural modularity in neural networks ensures functional specialization remains unclear. Here the authors show that specialization can emerge in neural modules placed under reso...

What's the right way to think about modularity in the brain? This devilish 😈 question is a big part of my research now, and it started with this paper with @solarpunkgabs.bsky.social, finally published after the first preprint in 2021! 🤖🧠🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Serene, empty lecture hall with assigned seats (dark table-clothed desks with named mugs for every participants; white plastic chairs) that looks out onto a landscape of dunes and summery beaches, waiting to be filled with life of the next class of Imbizo.

... and so it begins again.🧠🌴🌊🌍 Imbizo.africa is on its way, ... without me 😥, but look! at the views through those windows.
I wanna go and learn about all things neuro at one of the most beautiful spots in the world. Don't you, too?