Apurva Ratan Murty

Empathy + Action = A Better World

Thank you, Jane Goodall

Excited to share new work with @hleemasson.bsky.social , Ericka Wodka, Stewart Mostofsky and @lisik.bsky.social! We investigated how simultaneous vision and language signals are combined in the brain using naturalistic+controlled fMRI. Read the paper here: osf.io/b5p4n
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Thanks Tahereh! I’ll unfortunately not be at Neurips this year but will request Herrick to reach out directly. I’m sure he’d appreciate the feedback. He can also tell you about other things works and esp things that don’t work as well.

At Neurips? You can now check out @herrickfung.bsky.social ‘s new work on modeling individual differences at two workshops! Much more to say on this awesome colab with @dobyrahnev.bsky.social very soon. 🙂

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/

Functional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.22.677834v1

ATTN🚨: I will be looking for PhD students through NYU's Center for Data Science PhD program this year. Applicants should have an interest in either NeuroAI (specifically biological attention or AI interpretability) or ML for Remote Sensing. Visit my lab website for more info: lindsay-lab.github.io

What fun to hang out in Amsterdam with former lab members, dear friends, and scientific rock stars @evfedorenko.bsky.social‬ @lisik.bsky.social‬ @apurvaratan.bsky.social‬ @carolinerobertson.bsky.social‬

Omg seeing this just now. Happy birthday Iris!

Find me at the poster session tomorrow! I’ll be standing in for Saskia who unfortunately couldn’t make it. Will presenting joint work with @kathadobs.bsky.social on MEG decoding during object permanence #CCN2025

What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex?

Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut.

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New preprint! 🚨→ Determinants of Visual Ambiguity Resolution. A new work with @ortiztudela.bsky.social @jvoeller.bsky.social @martinhebart.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

We created ~2k images and collected ~100k responses to study visual ambiguity.

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

#VSS2025 Tomorrow in Talk Room 2 at 9.15AM. Mayukh Deb will be presenting our work on TopoNets! You can read more about it at toponets.github.io. But there will be a lot more!

Come listen to Ben Lahner present a new combined fMRI dataset - MOSAIC. Happening soon at 1145 in Talk Room 2.

List of speakers for symposium: “25 Years of Seeing ‘Stuff’—Advances and Challenges in Material Perception”

Kick off #VSS2025 with our symposium “25 Years of Seeing ‘Stuff’—Advances and Challenges in Material Perception” in Talk Room 2 on Friday morning 10:30am – 12:30pm.
We have a great lineup of speakers who will share deep insights and fun demos! 👀🧠🌊
@vssmtg.bsky.social #neuroskyence #visionscience

Congratulations Emalie!!

YouTube video by NeuroAI Emerging Leaders Webinar Series NeuroAI Emerging Leaders Webinar Series: Aran Nayebi

In case it's of interest, links to the technical details behind each topic:

1. NeuroAgents research program: tinyurl.com/yc48bnz4 & talk here: youtube.com/watch?v=9_7m...

2. NeuroAI Turing Test (with @jfeather.bsky.social, Meenakshi Khosla, and @apurvaratan.bsky.social): arxiv.org/abs/2502.16238

White matter connections of human ventral temporal cortex are organized by cytoarchitecture, eccentricity and category-selectivity from birth Nature Human Behaviour - Kubota et al. find that white matter connections of ventral temporal cortex are innately organized by cytoarchitecture, category and eccentricity from birth, and also...

The latest paper from my PhD is now out in Nature Human Behavior! rdcu.be/edRwQ

I'm hiring a full-time research assistant to start this Summer!

The lab studies perception and cognition from infancy to adulthood using neuroimaging, behavioral, and computational approaches

For more details about the lab and the position, see: vlad-lab.com/join

#psychjobs #neurojobs

Thanks Katharina!

TopoNets: High Performing Vision and Language Models with Brain-Like Topography Neurons in the brain are organized such that nearby cells tend to share similar functions. AI models lack this organization, and past efforts to introduce topography have often led to trade-offs betwe...

Yes! Here you go! arxiv.org/abs/2501.16396

Thanks Pouya! :)

TopoNets: High Performing Vision and Language Models with Brain-Like Topography Neurons in the brain are organized such that nearby cells tend to share similar functions. AI models lack this organization, and past efforts to introduce topography have often led to trade-offs betwe...

The paper is here: arxiv.org/abs/2501.16396
OpenReview link is here: openreview.net/forum?id=THq...
Project Website: toponets.github.io

and finally. Our experience with
@iclr-conf.bsky.social reviews was pretty great! The reviews were constructive, reviewers actively involved during discussion and encouraging in their response.. How refreshing! Appending a particularly favorite reviewer comment

I also want to say that this work builds on a number of excellent prior work on topographic models! Here are a few: Hyo Lee, Eshed Margalit, Dan Yamins, Fenil Doshi, Taha Binhuraib, @bashivan.bsky.social, @mschrimpf.bsky.social, @taliakonkle.bsky.social @timkietzmann.bsky.social and others..

In summary, we're psyched to share this work with everyone! All our models (10+), checkpoints and code are available. This is my grad student Mayukh's first paper from the lab! Please give him (and us!) feedback. This is also one of the first full studies coming out from the lab at Georgia Tech!

We also find units clustered according to distinct temporal integration windows a la recent results from Ev Fedorenko's lab. (thanks to Sam Normal Haigere's lab for cool methods to find these units in GPTs!)

TopoNet-Vision models recapitulate topographic signatures in visual cortex like category selectivity for faces, bodies, scenes and large-scale organizational biases a la @taliakonkle.bsky.social 's work!

Even though the focus of this paper was mostly on the engineering and the topo algorithm, we couldn't hold back and had to do some neuro tests as well! :) TopoNets predict responses in monkey neural data (BrainScore) and human brains (NSD, see paper) very well!

We also find that inducing topography into neural networks makes the model features way more sparse and parameter efficient. We show this using both L1 pruning and downsampling features!