Jascha Achterberg
Neuroscience & AI at University of Oxford and University of Cambridge | Principles of efficient computations + learning in brains, AI, and silicon 🧠 NeuroAI | Gates Cambridge Scholar
www.jachterberg.com
- Enjoyed @giacomoi.bsky.social commentary in PNAS on how #NeuroAI and Neuromorphic Engineering should come together to allow brain circuit motifs to positively influence the design of computing systems: Biological fidelity: The engine driving the neuromorphic renaissance www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
- Giacomo's commentary was in response to this great recent paper by Iqbal et al., also in PNAS: "Biologically grounded neocortex computational primitives implemented on neuromorphic hardware improve vision transformer performance" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Let me know if you are in San Diego for #Neurips and wanted to chat about #compneuro / #neuroAI and neuroscience-inspired computing!
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergHow do brain areas control each other? 🧠🎛️ ✨In our NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight paper, we introduce a data-driven framework to answer this question using deep learning, nonlinear control, and differential geometry.🧵⬇️
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergA beautiful summary of our paper! Thank you @neurosock.bsky.social
- The hippocampus is not a library, it is a simulation engine. HPC is known for storing maps of the environment but not so known for generating planned trajectories. This paper proposes that recurrence in CA3 is crucial for planning. A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergOne example of how multiplexing might be implemented in the brain was shown in the great work by Thomas Akam with Dmitri Kullmann, a decade ago. The papers are cited well but the general multiplexing idea never really took the field by storm as much as it deserved www.nature.com/articles/nrn...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergPostdoc fellowship opportunity for ECRs (<3 yrs post-PhD). Note that if you want to apply to work with me as your mentor, our dept has an internal deadline of Dec 4th so please email me asap. Our internal process is shorter than the full application. 🤖🧠🧪 royalcommission1851.org/fellowships/...
- Brains have many pathways / subnetworks but which principles underlie their formation? In our #NeurIPS paper lead by Jack Cook we identify biologically relevant inductive biases that create pathways in brain-like Mixture-of-Experts models🧵 #neuroskyence #compneuro #neuroAI arxiv.org/abs/2506.02813
- We first needed to create a model in which we could study pathway formation. We chose a Heterogeneous Mixture-of-Experts architecture, in which information can be dynamically routed to computational experts, or regions, of varying sizes. We train model on 82 tasks of varying complexity (ModCog)!
- We then set three criteria to determine whether pathways had formed: (1) Consistency: Models trained on the same tasks should have similar pathways (2) Self-sufficiency: Pathways should be primarily reliant on their own experts (3) Distinctness: Many distinct pathways should be present
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View full threadThis new model opens a whole new world of analysing multi region interaction across trials and tasks! More analysis and findings can be found in our paper linked below. Work lead by Jack Cook, and with great help from @danakarca.bsky.social and @somnirons.bsky.social ! arxiv.org/abs/2506.02813
- Check out this cool new work lead by @pengfei-sun.bsky.social !
- Psst - neuromorphic folks. Did you know that you can solve the SHD dataset with 90% accuracy using only 22 kb of parameter memory by quantising weights and delays? Check out our preprint with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social and @danakarca.bsky.social, or read the TLDR below. 👇🤖🧠🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2510.27434
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg
With my great advisors and colleagues, @achterbrain.bsky.social @zhe @danakarca.bsky.social @neural-reckoning.org, we show that if heterogeneous axonal delays (imprecise) can capture the essential temporal structure of a task, spiking networks do not need precise synaptic weights to perform well.- Psst - neuromorphic folks. Did you know that you can solve the SHD dataset with 90% accuracy using only 22 kb of parameter memory by quantising weights and delays? Check out our preprint with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social and @danakarca.bsky.social, or read the TLDR below. 👇🤖🧠🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2510.27434
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergCome be our colleague at EPFL! Several open calls for positions 🧪🧠🤖 * Neuroscience www.epfl.ch/about/workin... (deadline Oct 1) * Life Science Engineering www.epfl.ch/about/workin... * CS general call www.epfl.ch/about/workin... * Learning Sciences www.epfl.ch/about/workin...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergStatistical methods for dissecting interactions between brain areas www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergATTN🚨: 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
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergCould we understand vision as a type of problem-solving? In this new paper, we develop a computational model that iteratively refines the hypothesis about the visual input with evolutionary search. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... work led by @tarunkhajuria.bsky.social #visionscience #neuroAI
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergThis is really funny…
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergCan large language models play simple arcade games? Kind of. Sometimes. Slowly, and not as well as a simple search algorithm. And only if you format the input right. Of course, we made a benchmark to investigate this in more detail, because that's what we do. Paper here: arxiv.org/html/2508.08...
- Great and detailed blog post on compositionality, written by Eric Elmoznino: ericelmoznino.github.io/blog/2025/08... #compneuro #neuroai #neuroscience
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg#CCN2025 is over. Over 5 days there were 6 fantastic keynotes, 550 posters, 3 community events, 3 keynote & tutorials, 3 generative adversarial collaborations, 8 Satellite events, 1 community lunch meeting, 1 cross-conference hackathon, 1 competition, coffee all day, stroopwafels on day 1,
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergI'm curious if any senior nonhuman primate Neuro-AI researchers would be interested in joining Queen's University if we were to obtain a research chair position (full professor level)? Could you please send me a confidential message to indicate your interest? Gunnar.blohm@queensu.ca
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergSad to miss #CCN2025. It will be the 1st conference where a PhD working w/ me will speak 😭 go see Lubna's talk (Friday) about distributed neural correlates of flexible decision making in 🐒, work done in collaboration w/ @scottbrincat.bsky.social @siegellab.bsky.social & @earlkmiller.bsky.social
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergThe registration desk for the first day is now open! If you are looking for information to get to the venue, you can find it here: 2025.ccneuro.org/venue-inform... Look out for the CCN banners!
- Welcome to the first day of #CCN2025 ! 🧠 Today, we're starting with networking, opening remarks, and two fantastic keynotes from Nancy Kanwisher and Anna Schapiro. More details in the thread below 👇
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergLess than 2 weeks until CCN 2025 in Amsterdam! Here's everything you need to know to prepare for the 8th Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference, August 12-15 at University of Amsterdam 🧠
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergI wrote an article earlier in the week arguing that we need to give junior researchers more independence earlier, and this should be our focus, not moonshot mega projects led by senior researchers. I was surprised how much agreement I'm seeing. So next question: how do we do this?
- Large-scale projects run the risk of stifling scientific independence. Instead, let’s explore alternative mechanisms of collaboration, writes @neuralreckoning.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/funding/neur...
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg#NeuroAI finds itself facing an interesting question these days: 1) which of these now-many schemes for bio-plausible credit assignment actually operate in the brain? -and if more than one- 2) how the hell do they operate when they, inevitably, interact?
- 1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance? Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... led by @jrbch.bsky.social
- Now out 🚨 🧪 : our preprint describing dynamics of an extended frontal lobe network (4 cortical regions) in monkeys solving complex multi-step spatial problems! We observe distributed codes for goals, states, and planned moves across PFC! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroscience #compneuro 🧵👇
- *Task* Monkeys solve a multi-step maze task which requires them to navigate a 2D grid from the start location to 1 of 4 goal locations, using saccades. Monkeys start at the center, need to remember the goal location (presented at the start of the trial), and navigate using presented choice options.
- *Routes through the maze* Depending on available choice options, goal locations can be reached via 2-step or 4-step routes.
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View full threadSuper excited to share & discuss this work! This was co-lead with Valentina Mione, in collaboration with Makoto Kusunoki and Mark Buckley; supervised by John Duncan. The link to the paper is here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A summary is also available on my website: www.jachterberg.com/maze
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergOn behalf of Nicole Carr: new preprint from the Chand/Moore labs! High-resolution laminar recordings reveal structure-function relationships in monkey V1. 1/4 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergScreen shots from BBC Click during the experiment. Now to reveal some of that that mad experiment is telling us:
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergJust a few months until Cognitive Computational Neuroscience comes to Amsterdam! Check out our now-complete schedule for #CCN2025, with descriptions of each of the Generative Adversarial Collaborations (GACs), Keynotes-and-Tutorials (K&Ts), Community Events, Keynote Speakers, and social activities!
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg🧠 #CCN2025 (August 12-15, Amsterdam) Update: Early registration deadline approaching! ⏰ Register by May 23 for early pricing ($375 student/$495 regular) ➡️ 2025.ccneuro.org/meeting-regi... Full schedule now available: 2025.ccneuro.org/schedule-of-...
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg🧵how to: figures that fit
- Reposted by Jascha Achterbergsomething strange just happened on the internet...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergI think we're overdue for a rollup of the best papers of the past year in NeuroAI. Candidates?
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergPreprint Alert 🚀 Can we simultaneously learn transformation-invariant and transformation-equivariant representations with self-supervised learning? TL;DR Yes! This is possible via simple predictive learning & architectural inductive biases – without extra loss terms and predictors! 🧵 (1/10)
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg#Overleaf down 2 days before NeurIPS deadlines
- New study out now (doi.org/10.1111/ejn....)! Modelling MEG dynamics with RNNs reveals how reduced inhibition may shape neural signatures in ZDHHC9-linked neurodivergence!🧠🧬 Thanks to all co-authors! @achterbrain.bsky.social @danakarca.bsky.social @kbgenesbrains.bsky.social @duncanastle.bsky.social
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergImpressive study from Richard Morris's group: Hippocampal reactivation of planned trajectories is required for effective goal choice in an allocentric memory task #hippocampus #neuroskyence #navigation #memory #planning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg#neuroskyence people (maybe vision people in particular): how do you think information is "read out" from the visual system? Do downstream areas like PFC get to query anything from V1 to IT? Or just later areas? How plastic are these readouts? Etc. IMO this is always under constrained in modeling.
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergBecause we must build good things while we scream about the bad, I have started a "Data for Good" team @data-for-good-team.bsky.social that partners with organizations needing short-term data science help. We have three projects ongoing & will add more as our capacity grows. data-for-good-team.org
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergNew work by @liushuze.bsky.social establishes an empirical link between policy complexity and neural dimensionality: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Super interesting work with a computational model of how auditory hallucinations may arise: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... #neuroscience #compneuro
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergHow do cognitive maps fail? And how can this help us understand/treat psychosis? My lab at @oxexppsy.bsky.social is hiring a Postdoc tinyurl.com/2p935hhz and RA tinyurl.com/3myfpb78 to answer these questions in mouse models. Here's why you might want to join: 🧵
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg📢 Fantastic post doc job opportunity in my group and co-supervised by DeepMind's @mariaeckstein.bsky.social - now live! Ad here: tinyurl.com/26rafzdc - deadline May 29th. This is part of a very exciting collaboration with @melgaby.bsky.social and Matt Nour, funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social.
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergJoining us for CCN2025 in Amsterdam? Early registration discount is still available until the 23rd May! 2025.ccneuro.org/meeting-regi... Need financial support? We got travel awards & caregiver grants available: 2025.ccneuro.org/travel-awards/ 2025.ccneuro.org/caregiver-aw...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergAttending CCN in Amsterdam this August? Come and join our workshop! Details/sign-up info below.
- We are hosting a workshop on using Naturalistic Games within #NeuroAI at CCN2025 in August @cogcompneuro.bsky.social ! Below you can let us know if you would like to join / have relevant work to share / have any ideas for the workshop in general! #compneuro #neuroscience forms.gle/BPPMfeWZu8dh...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergHot takes/kind reminders a) “the bitter lesson”’s promise of scale did not deliver wrt AI reasoning & higher cog functions—O3 hallucinates 2x more than O1 b) prediction is not understanding, hallucinating is worse c) gen AI could help neuroAI but following latest AI trends is not a paradigm shift
- How can we make progress in developing a general model of neural computation rather than a series of disjointed models tied to specific experimental circumstances, ask Eva Dyer and @tyrellturing.bsky.social in the latest entry in our NeuroAI series. www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/acce...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergMy paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉 tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2x...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergNeural dynamics of an extended frontal lobe network in goal-subgoal problem solving biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
- We are hosting a workshop on using Naturalistic Games within #NeuroAI at CCN2025 in August @cogcompneuro.bsky.social ! Below you can let us know if you would like to join / have relevant work to share / have any ideas for the workshop in general! #compneuro #neuroscience forms.gle/BPPMfeWZu8dh...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergTake our short 5-min anonymous survey on the Neuromorphic field’s current state & future: 📋 tinyurl.com/3jkszrnr 🗓️ Open until May 12, 2025 Results will be shared openly and submitted for publication. Your input will help us understand how interdisciplinary trends are shaping the field.
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergSome scientists think they are doing this "on purpose", whether learned or by happenstance of selective breeding. www.cell.com/current-biol...
- Super cool paper on a canonical circuit motif, replicating typical neuronal dynamics like attractors, winner-take-all behavior etc. in neurmorphic hardware! By team surrounding @melikapayvand.bsky.social & @giacomoi.bsky.social #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Jascha Achterberg🚀Exciting News! 🚀 Join us for the first UniReps x @ucl-neuroai.bsky.social Meetup at @ucl.ac.uk @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social on Sept 8, 2025! 🎉 🎙️ Keynote by @irisgroen.bsky.social (University of Amsterdam) 📍 Register now! 👉 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
- 🗓️ **CCN25 deadline reminder**: 2-page extended abstract submissions are due this Thursday (April 10th). We recommend drafting submissions in OpenReview (openreview.net/group?id=ccn...) well in advance. OpenReview drafts remain editable until the deadline.
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergAnother nail in the STDP coffin
- Behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not Hebbian spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), explains heterogenous place field shifting in the mouse hippocampus 🧠🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- This is an awesome feed!
- *Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergAs our community increasingly shifts toward embracing the complexity of the brain, this new book by Xiao-Jing Wang will be an essential go-to. He is among a small, prescient group that embraced important ideas before the rest of us. Here he unpacks them. 1/2 www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...
- Looking for an exciting fellowship in AI & Neuro, with competitive salary (~£100k)? We got a new position in the lab at Oxford, working with @somnirons.bsky.social and me! 🧪 Our project: encode.pillar.vc/projects/beh... General info: encode.pillar.vc #compneuro #neuroai #neuroscience #sciencejobs
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergIf you’re in SF, come build tools-for-science with us later this month! 🛠️ #opensource #neuroskyence #openscience #machinelearning #compchem #chemsky
- We (www.compmotifs.com) are coming to SF! Together with Pebblebed, we’re hosting a 2-day hackathon on 26-27 March for builders and scientists across disciplines to build new methods and tools for the computational and natural sciences. Join us: lu.ma/t5yik06g. Reposts will be much appreciated!
- Interested in building new tools for accelerating the natural sciences and based in the Bay Area? Join for this super exciting hackathon at the end of March! 🧪 #neuroscience #NeuroAI
- We (www.compmotifs.com) are coming to SF! Together with Pebblebed, we’re hosting a 2-day hackathon on 26-27 March for builders and scientists across disciplines to build new methods and tools for the computational and natural sciences. Join us: lu.ma/t5yik06g. Reposts will be much appreciated!
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergI’m thrilled to share that I just joined @LilaSciences as SVP of Open-Endedness! You can join my team here: For Research Scientist: job-boards.greenhouse.io/lila/jobs/78... For Research Engineer: job-boards.greenhouse.io/lila/jobs/78...
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergTraveling waves of neural activity are observed all over the brain. Can they be used to augment neural networks? I am thrilled to share our new work, "Traveling Waves Integrate Spatial Information Through Time" with @andykeller.bsky.social! 1/13
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergWe are extremely excited to announce Hava Siegelmann from the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a keynote speaker of CCN2025! If you want to contribute to this year’s CCN program, the March 14 deadline for special event submissions is approaching rapidly (details below!).
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergWe're hiring a Full Professor of Computational Neuroscience in Bristol!!!! (...... or Data Science, AI, Digital Health etc). Come join us in a vibrant city and thriving place for neuroscience and AI research. Please share :-)
- Reposted by Jascha AchterbergWhat should count as a good model of intelligence? AI is advancing rapidly, but how do we know if it captures intelligence in a scientifically meaningful way? We propose the *NeuroAI Turing Test*—a benchmark that evaluates models based on both behavior and internal representations.
