Postdoc Pavel Tolmachev has a new paper out in Nature Machine Intelligence showing that the choice of single-unit activation function in a recurrent neural network (RNN) can determine the types of solutions the network can learn when trained on tasks. RNNs are commonly used to model neural dynamics, and this result highlights the importance of…
The International Brain Laboratory (IBL), of which we are a member, published two landmark papers in Nature this week, presenting the first comprehensive brain-wide maps of neural activity during decision-making in mice. These studies reveal how neural circuits across the entire brain coordinate during complex behavioral tasks and demonstrate…
A new paper led by Mikhail Genkin was published in Nature. This work develops a flexible modeling framework that dissociates the dynamics and geometry of neural representations on single trials and infers both simultaneously from experimental data. Applying this approach to recordings from the premotor cortex, the study shows that…
Congratulations to our research assistant Sabrina who has accepted the offer to attend Stanford’s PhD program in Electrical Engineering beginning Fall 2025. She is planning to study dendritic computation, brain machine interfaces, and brain-inspired computing hardware. While we’ll miss her presence in our lab, we have no doubt she will…
Congratulations to Chris Langdon, whose recent paper, "Latent circuit inference from heterogeneous neural responses during cognitive tasks" won the Best Postdoc Paper award at this year's Princeton Neuroscience Institute retreat!
Postdoc Chris Langdon has a new paper out in Nature Neuroscience showing that RNNs use low-dimensional latent circuit mechanisms to solve cognitive tasks. The paper describes a general framework for identifying these latent circuit mechanisms and then applies it to the specific case of context-dependent decision-making tasks in RNNs and PFC…
Congratulations to postdoc Pasha Tolmachev for his new BioRxiv preprint: “Single-unit activations confer inductive biases for emergent circuit solutions to cognitive tasks”!
See detailed tweetprint!
Congratulations to 3rd-year grad student Jiayi Zhang, who is one of the recipients of the 2024 Cassidy Yang Memorial Prize! This award is given to graduate students who excel academically in science or engineering and display leadership in mentoring other students, participating in outreach activities, and fostering the graduate student…
Congratulations to Christopher Langdon, who was one of the winners of PNI's inaugural Innovator Award for postdoctoral researchers!
Congratulations to 2nd year grad student Iman Wahle, who is the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program!