Alisa Leshchenko 🦕
CompNeuro @Columbia Zuckerman Institute, Fusi Lab | Cognitive maps, abstraction, compositionality in a neural substrate | #NeuroAI
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕When we see something that's moving, our memories about it end up projected forward in time: We remember it further along than it was. In a new paper in 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, out today and led by @dillonplunkett.bsky.social, we demonstrate that this happens even when there is 𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙨𝙤𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧.🧵
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕It has been so so fun to think with some of my favorite scientists about what it means to understand!
- What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Vase with Irises - 1890 botfrens.com/collections/46/cont…
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕LLMs are trained to compress data by mapping sequences to high-dim representations! How does the complexity of this mapping change across LLM training? How does it relate to the model’s capabilities? 🤔 Announcing our #NeurIPS2025 📄 that dives into this. 🧵below #AIResearch #MachineLearning #LLM
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Excited to share a new preprint w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social! Why are there gradients of plasticity and sparsity along the neocortex–hippocampus hierarchy? We show that brain-like organization of these properties emerges in ANNs that meta-learn layer-wise plasticity and sparsity. bit.ly/4kB1yg5
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Connectome suggests brain’s synaptic weights follow heavy-tailed distributions, yet most analyses of RNNs assume Gaussian connectivity. 🧵⬇️ Our @alleninstitute.org #NeurIPS2025 paper shows heavy-tailed weights can strongly affect dynamics, trade off robustness + attractor dimension.
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕**Discovering network dynamics** One more on estimating dynamics of complex systems, this time with symbolic regression doi.org/10.1038/s435...
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Total Lunar Eclipse - 26 May 2021 - From Ángel López-Sánchez - flic.kr/p/2m1PLyZ
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Happy birthday Kay Sage. The artist & poet, famous for her surrealist paintings, often referencing architecture & the built environment, was born today in 1898. #surrealism
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕The Eye of Silence wikiart.org/en/max-ernst/the-ey…
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕What do we talk about when we talk about "readout"? I argued that our overly specialized, modular approach to studying the brain has given us a simplistic view of readout. 🧠📈
- Figuring out how the brain uses information from visual neurons may require new tools, writes @neurograce.bsky.social. Hear from 10 experts in the field. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Prominence 10-26-10 - From Jason Major (jpmajor.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/8NkYgk
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕ESA ROSETTA 14 July 2015 - From 2di7 & titanio44 - flic.kr/p/vpqn2z
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Mimas, Epimetheus and Rings - From Gordan Ugarković (ugordan.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/5oPunj
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕🧠🚨 How does the hippocampus transform the visual similarity space to resolve memory interference? In this new preprint, we found that the hippocampus sequentially inverts the behaviorally relevant dimensions of similarity 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Preprint 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 Alisa Leshchenko 🦕So excited to see this preprint released from the lab into the wild. Charlotte has developed a theory for how learning curriculum influences learning generalization. Our theory makes straightforward neural predictions that can be tested in future experiments. (1/4) 🧠🤖 🧠📈 #MLSky
- 🚨 New preprint alert! 🧠🤖 We propose a theory of how learning curriculum affects generalization through neural population dimensionality. Learning curriculum is a determining factor of neural dimensionality - where you start from determines where you end up. 🧠📈 A 🧵: tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Tomorrow the next meeting of MIT #Consciousness Club. This is a Zoom link 🔗⬇️
- The next session of the MIT Consciousness Club is on Thursday 16, 12pm-1:30pm. Rachel Denison will present “Attentional Distortions of Subjective Perception”. More information here: sites.google.com/view/mit-con....
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Max Ernst Showing a Young Girl the Head of his Father wikiart.org/en/max-ernst/max-er…
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Cielo di piombo, ispettore Callaghan...
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Jour...sur la grève
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕The domain of Arnheim (1962) by René Magritte
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Kay Sage
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Misha Kovalov
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Interesting paper! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Super fun New blog post about @kristorpjensen.bsky.social awesome preprint.
- How does the prefrontal cortex plan? New research from @kristorpjensen.bsky.social & colleagues proposes a ‘spacetime attractor’ model, showing that the brain may plan using the same principles it uses to fill in missing information about the present. www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/blog/new...
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕If you know ground truth, you can evaluate LLM annotation by measuring accuracy. But what if the annotation task is subjective and you have many judgments by different observers? This paper offers a method for assessing whether divergence of a single LLM is outside expected human range. +
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕University of Vienna Ceiling Paintings (Medicine), detail showing Hygieia botfrens.com/collections/109/con…
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕here the trick is to unpack the word *understanding* it’s not about what each neuron does, but the rules shaping the behaviour of biological systems! "rules for development and learning in brains may be far easier to understand than their resulting properties" 👇👌 arxiv.org/abs/1907.06374
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Galalite Picture (Gz.III) 1932 by László Moholy-Nagy
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory www.cell.com/trends/cogni... #neuroscience
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Language is a great example - not necessary for intelligence to emerge, but might be enough to bootstrap. Once you’re using language data you’re not building intelligence de novo. I’d bet social interactions are the opposite - you need them for intelligence to emerge but not to bootstrap.
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Always find it an interesting question which ingredients are necessary for intelligence to emerge from scratch vs which are necessary if you only want to bootstrap from an existing intelligent system…
- Moreover, AGI might also require social interactions to become a reality, where cultural evolution (and extended mind) play a major role. It is not by chance that brain and culture evolved together, allowing complex minds to emerge @anilseth.bsky.social @mitibennett.bsky.social
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Can consciousness arise purely from computation, or does it require the biological mechanisms that allow computing? The tension between computational roles and biological realizers may hold the key. Check this paper by @neddo.bsky.social @mkhochb.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Wow, what a powerhouse of a paper! Physiology from three different sites in auditory cortex too. I'm a little surprised all birds were anesthetized, but still, amazing findings! Fellow ARO members should love this paper.
- When part of a word is replaced by noise, humans still hear the whole word. How do brains do this? New from Meliza group in @natcomms.nature.com Le et al. study this in zebra finches, a model system for vocal learning www.nature.com/articles/s41... #prattle 💬 #neuroskyence 1/5
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕A study led by Cina Aghamohammadi is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! We developed a mathematical framework for partitioning spiking variability, which revealed that spiking irregularity is nearly invariant for each neuron and decreases along the cortical hierarchy. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Sparks (2001) by Andrew Wyeth
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕I'll pass them apart botfrens.com/collections/69/cont…
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕The world through infant eyes: Evidence for the early emergence of the cardinal orientation bias www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕New paper dropped! Led by @thosvarley.bsky.social and Pai Vaibhav, we show that flows of information within a #xenobot resemble flows of information observed in adult human brains. Thomas provides caveats and context below. w/ @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, Caitlin Grasso, & Jeantine Lunshof.
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕AFF Architekten / Lichtenberg District Office of Berlin / Lew-Tolstoi-Schule / Building / 2022
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Lunar Occultation of Saturn 9/17/2024 - From Ryan Kinnett (rkinnett.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/2qh5d47
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕CASSINI (4) - From Jacint Roger (landru79.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/2iKfns6
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉 I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty). See lab page and doc below for details!
- The Visual Learning Lab at UC San Diego is looking for a postdoctoral research fellow to join our lab! Read more about our lab at www.vislearnlab.org
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans? New paper on this from my group: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125 🧵 1/10
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Very excited to share that our work (together with co-first author Shanka Subhra Mondal and @neuroai.bsky.social ) on a brain-inspired architecture for planning with LLMs is now out in Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41... (thread below)
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Composition in Color A wikiart.org/en/piet-mondrian/co…
- Reposted by Alisa Leshchenko 🦕Titan on the side - From Val Klavans (valklavans.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/dfiN8k
