Alex Williams

Do AI Models Perform Human-like Abstract Reasoning Across Modalities? OpenAI's o3-preview reasoning model exceeded human accuracy on the ARC-AGI benchmark, but does that mean state-of-the-art models recognize and reason with the abstractions that the task creators inten...

Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans?

New paper on this from my group:

arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125

🧵 1/10

YouTube video by Civil Servants Coalition Mark Histed, NIH Scientist *speaking in personal capacity

Federal workers are speaking out on how the Trump regime is harming Americans:

"We stand here today at a moment of the greatest assault of our lifetimes on our freedoms. The US Constitution is being shredded... We are here to call on Congress to stand up and stop it."

youtu.be/uw1KwIBgrCw?...

The neural control & computation lab is recruiting!

If you're interested in using large-scale neural population recordings to study how the brain learns to produce complex and flexible behaviours, please get in touch.

www.ncclab.ca

Many treat uncertainty = a number. At Apple, we're rethinking this: LLMs should output strings that reveal all information of their internal distributions. We find that Reasoning, SFT, CoT can't do it - yet. To get there, we introduce the SelfReflect benchmark.

arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20295

Facial expressions in mice reveal latent cognitive variables and their neural correlates Nature Neuroscience - The face reveals more than just emotion. Cazettes, Reato and colleagues show that subtle facial movements reveal hidden cognitive states, reflecting the brain’s ongoing...

Did you know that facial expressions reveal more than meets the eye? 🤯

Our new study shows that even a mouse's face 🐭 can reflect hidden neural computations🧠. Turns out, facial expressions are more than just emotions!

We're so excited to see this paper out @natneuro.nature.com 🎉
🔗: rdcu.be/eIQzO

Interested in doing a Ph.D. to work on building models of the brain/behavior? Consider applying to graduate schools at CU Anschutz:
1. Neuroscience www.cuanschutz.edu/graduate-pro...
2. Bioengineering engineering.ucdenver.edu/bioengineeri...

You could work with several comp neuro PIs, including me.

Accurate identification of communication between multiple interacting neural populations Neural recording technologies now enable simultaneous recording of population activity across many brain regions, motivating the development of data-driven models of communication between brain region...

(1/n) How can we infer single-trial communication between 🧠 regions? Check out our ICML 2025 paper: “Accurate Identification of Communication Between Multiple Interacting Neural Populations,” by Belle Liu and @jsacks.bsky.social in my lab: arxiv.org/abs/2506.19094

This is the way

bsky.app/profile/itsn...

I still think the major funders should all set up their own PLoS One-style journals (peer reviewed for rigour but not impact) and mandate that if you take their money, you publish the resulting research there, full stop

Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment.

The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP

jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window ALT: a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window

I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real:

I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job!

I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math

and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

Neuronal signatures of successful one-shot memory in mid-level visual cortex High-capacity, one-shot visual recognition memory challenges theories of learning and neural coding because it requires rapid, robust, and durable representations. Most studies have focused on the hip...

New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/

Schulman thinks Jay isn’t a hardened cynic who is carrying out MAHA marching orders, but an idealist who has naively stumbled into being used as a tool of authoritarianism. He’s just too gosh darn nice & devoted to reason to do this willingly. This view is far too charitable.

A deep dive into the destruction of US cancer research by @jonathanmahler.bsky.social “It’s an absolutely unmitigated disaster,” a former top official at NIH told him. “It will take decades to recover from this, if we ever do.” Gift link: nyti.ms/48iH3Cr

Though it’s traumatic for me to bring this up, I was targeted by a group allied with Turning Point USA in 2018, with the help of Tucker Carlson on Fox. My home address circulated online and I got death threats. 1/

Great opportunity to learn to use fancy neural data analysis tools developed at the @flatironinstitute.org. Sign up for this workshop at SFN 2025!

🎉 Deadline is *tomorrow*!
Join the @flatironinstitute.org workshop on pynapple & NeMos @sfn.org this November to analyze and model neural data

pynapple: analyze neural time series
NeMoS: model neural population dynamics
Meals + accommodation included
👉 neurorse.flatironinstitute.org/events/2025/...

New workshop! Just before SFN, join the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Neuroscience of the Simons Foundation for a workshop on pynapple and NeMoS. Learn how to use these open-source packages to analyze and model neural data! Accommodation & meals provided. Link ⬇️

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are not safe on Utah education campuses. State laws allow open carry guns and our politicians fan the flames of hate and division. The USA will never be a “free” country until something is actually done about gun violence! I fear for where we are heading 😢

⏳ Deadline is next Friday! Apply now to join our #SfN25 workshop on pynapple & nemos. Learn to analyze & model neural data using software developed at @flatironinstitute.org
Accommodations + meals included! 👉

#Cosyne2026 is now open for business!

Show us what you got both for the main meeting & workshop proposals 🧠🥳🧠🥳🧠

Motor cortex flexibly deploys a high-dimensional repertoire of subskills Skilled movement often requires flexibly combining multiple subskills, each requiring dedicated control strategies and underlying computations. How the motor system achieves such versatility remains u...

Of potential interest to those keen on motor control and/or multi-task networks. Congrats to Elom and Eric.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Simons Foundation Launches Collaboration on the Physics of Learning and Neural Computation Simons Foundation Launches Collaboration on the Physics of Learning and Neural Computation on Simons Foundation

Led by @stanford.edu's @suryaganguli.bsky.social, our Simons Collaboration on the Physics of Learning & Neural Computation will study AI's fundamental scientific principles: www.simonsfoundation.org/simons-foundation-launches-collaboration-on-the-physics-of-learning-and-neural-computation/ #science

An optical brain-machine interface reveals a causal role of posterior parietal cortex in goal-directed navigation Relating neural circuitry to behavior is challenging due to closed loop interactions between neural activity, actions, and sensations. Sorrell et al. present evidence for a causal role of mouse PPC in...

We all know that correlation doesn't imply causation. So we took some correlations and tested if they were causal. Here's what happened:

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Finding correlates of the same signal in different brain areas is not evidence against specialisation, it is evidence for interconnection.

When I flush my toilet, the level in the tank and the flow rate in the supply pipe become perfectly correlated. Yet these toilet areas have distinct functions.

Convergent motifs of early olfactory processing are recapitulated by layer-wise efficient coding The architecture of early olfactory processing is a striking example of convergent evolution. Typically, a panel of broadly tuned receptors is selectively expressed in sensory neurons (each neuron exp...

Excited to share new computational work, led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos Fernandez del Castillo + contribution from Farhad Pashakanloo. We recover 3 core motifs in the olfactory system of evolutionarily distant animals using a biophysically-grounded model + efficient coding ideas!

New work with @shiyanliang.bsky.social‬, @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social, @intlbrainlab.bsky.social, Anna Levina. We uncover the principles that organize single-neuron timescales across the entire brain, unifying regional specialization with universal brain-wide dynamics: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Mice navigate scent trails using predictive policies Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.