Fall Semester 2025
December 2nd, 2025. External Speaker: Discovering Symbolic Models of Human and Animal Behavior with LLMs by Kim Stachenfeld (Columbia & Deepmind).
November 25th, 2025. Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain led by Luke Gong and Ryan Henry.
November 11th, 2025. Brain-like neural dynamics for behavioral control develop through reinforcement learning led by Omokhuwele Umoru, Mao Yasueda, and Latavia Thompson.
October 21st, 2025. Symmetries and Continuous Attractors in Disordered Neural Circuits led by Kevin Chen and David Carcamo.
October 20th, 2025. External Speaker: Building the brain’s efficient system-level architecture: optimisations across space, time, and multiple regions by Jascha Achterberg (Oxford).
October 7th, 2025. External Speaker: No blank slate: using pre-existing knowledge to learn new skills by Cristina Savin (NYU).
September 23rd, 2025 Faculty Speaker: Sequential predictive learning is a unifying theory for hippocampal representation and replay by Dan Levenstein (Yale).
September 16th, 2025. Performance-optimized hierarchical models predict neural responses in higher visual cortex led by Sanjana Taneja and Jose Betancourt.
Spring Semester 2025
April 30th, 2025. An opponent striatal circuit for distributional reinforcement learning led by Rahul Singh and Sylvia Blackmore.
- Related review written by the authors
April 23rd, 2025. External Speaker: Lightning Pose: improved animal pose estimation via semi-supervised learning, Bayesian ensembling and cloud-native open-source tools by Matt Whiteway (Columbia).
- Speaker bio
- Lecture explaining paper and tutorial series for the method
- Documentation and github
April 16th, 2025. Separability and geometry of object manifolds in deep neural networks led by Lihao Yan & Linghai Liu.
April 9th, 2025. Control-based learning of input-driven dynamics with applications to neural data led by Yongxu Zhang & James Lu.
March 19th, 2025. Learning High-Order Relationships of Brain Regions led by Weikang Qiu
March 5th, 2025. External Speaker: Predictive Auxiliary Objectives In Deep RL Mimic Learning In The Brain by Ching Fang (Harvard)
February 19th, 2025. Optimal information loading into working memory explains dynamic coding in the prefrontal cortex led by John Lazzari & Prabaha Gandopadhyay.
February 5th, 2025. Latent dynamical variables produce signatures of spatiotemporal criticality in large biological systems led by Baohua Zhou.
- Related paper that was also discussed
Fall Semester 2024
December 2024: External Speaker: Linking cognitive strategy, neural mechanism, and movement statistics in group foraging behaviors by Emily Mackevicius (Basis).
Behind the paper
high level description of the paper- Speaker bio
- Research institute co-founded by Emily
November 2024: Spatially embedded recurrent neural networks reveal widespread links between structural and functional neuroscience findings led by Arman Afrasiyabi and Dhananjay Bhaskar.
October 2024: Learnable latent embeddings for joint behavioural and neural analysis led by Amelia Johnson and Brian Gitahi.
- Summary of paper
October 2024: External Speaker: Traveling waves encode the recent past and enhance sequence learning by Andy Keller (Harvard).
September 2024: Relating transformers to models and neural representations of the hippocampal formation led by Dongyu Gong and Hantao Zhang.
September 2024: POYO-1: A Unified, Scalable Framework for Neural Population Decoding led by Awni Altabaa and Josue Ortega Caro.
- Summary of paper