Roxana Zeraati
In search of computational principles of natural adaptive behavior. Postdoc with Peter Dayan @mpicybernetics.bsky.social
Website: roxanazeraati.org
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiWanna compare dynamics across neural data, RNNs, or dynamical systems? We got a fast and furious method🏎️ The 1st preprint of my PhD 🥳 fast dynamical similarity analysis (fastDSA): 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2511.22828 💻: github.com/CMC-lab/fast... I’ll be @cosynemeeting.bsky.social - happy to chat 😉
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiWanna compare dynamics across different systems? See our fast and furious method developed by us (@armanbehrad.bsky.social @mmdtaha.bsky.social, @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social) together with our wonderful collaborators! You can already use our code: github.com/CMC-lab/fast...
- Wanna compare dynamics across neural data, RNNs, or dynamical systems? We got a fast and furious method🏎️ The 1st preprint of my PhD 🥳 fast dynamical similarity analysis (fastDSA): 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2511.22828 💻: github.com/CMC-lab/fast... I’ll be @cosynemeeting.bsky.social - happy to chat 😉
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiWe made DSA up to 150 times faster 🤯 by introducing 3 new optimization objectives and solvers to speed up the DSA alignment step. Instead of enforcing exact orthogonality at every iteration, we use faster formulations that approximate or penalize the constraint.
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiThrilled to see the first preprint of the lab out 🤩 Check it out if you need to compare dynamics in your data and RNN (or any other combinations of dynamical systems)!
- Wanna compare dynamics across neural data, RNNs, or dynamical systems? We got a fast and furious method🏎️ The 1st preprint of my PhD 🥳 fast dynamical similarity analysis (fastDSA): 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2511.22828 💻: github.com/CMC-lab/fast... I’ll be @cosynemeeting.bsky.social - happy to chat 😉
- If you need an efficient tool to compare neural dynamics across neuroscience and AI, look no further!
- Wanna compare dynamics across neural data, RNNs, or dynamical systems? We got a fast and furious method🏎️ The 1st preprint of my PhD 🥳 fast dynamical similarity analysis (fastDSA): 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2511.22828 💻: github.com/CMC-lab/fast... I’ll be @cosynemeeting.bsky.social - happy to chat 😉
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiWhen we learn complex tasks, we chunk them into sub-tasks that our brains orchestrate into action sequences. How we do this is not entirely understood. This work explores how to learn and internally control temporally abstracted sub-tasks in RL/AI with sequence models. arxiv.org/abs/2512.20605
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiWhy Does Life Keep Evolving These Geometric Patterns? www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiOur New Paper is out in Nature Human Behaviour: 🚨 Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials! 🦧 www.nature.com/articles/s41.... See 🧵
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiA competition to design small, efficient neural models may provide new insight into real brains—and perhaps unite disparate modeling efforts, writes @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/computationa...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiPublished @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social with @drewlinsley.bsky.social & @tonyfeng.bsky.social: As vision models scale to human/superhuman accuracy, they’re becoming worse models of primate vision—benchmark engineering isn’t neuroscience. @carneyinstitute.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiNew preprint from the lab: The fact that human brain activity can be measured at high res is *thrilling*. But often it's not spikes; it's "LFP". Sometimes LFP is 3x better for decoding (wow!). Sometimes it's a lot worse (sigh). Why? A mystery! In this thread, Catrina explains. Read her 🧵.
- 🚨 New preprint! Why do some insights from spikes translate to field potentials while others don't? In this paper we compare visual memory representations in spikes and LFPs to propose a general framework that answers this question. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵 (1/10) 🧠🟦 🧠💻
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiNew preprint. We show that in addition to reward prediction errors (RPEs), dorsal striatal dopamine signals encode sensory prediction errors (SPEs), the difference between sensory prior & observed stimulus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiOur new preprint is now live on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We established neuronal recordings in freely moving subterranean mammals, enabling functional studies of brains in extreme ecological niches. 🚀 #neuroscience #molerats #neuropixels
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiWhat looked like a hearing organ on a tiny stinkbug’s leg turned out to be something far stranger: a fungal nursery that mother bugs use to coat their newly laid eggs in protective symbiotic hyphae, shielding their offspring from parasitic wasps, a Science study finds. scim.ag/3MXQ4bt
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiCheck out our new paper on the #development of #gaze-following in wild #chimpanzees, led by @kris-sabbi.bsky.social, @zeppypearl.bsky.social, & Isabelle Monroe! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiJust published in JOSS: 'TranCIT: Transient Causal Interaction Toolbox' doi.org/10.21105/joss.09302
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiA new comparative study of seven lizard species, including chameleons and bearded dragons, finds an ancient sleep rhythm conserved over millennia. By Lauren Schenkman www.thetransmitter.org/sleep/snoozi...
- Reposted by Roxana Zeraati⚠️ New paper alert and what a way to end 2025! 🎉 Happy to share our story “Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals.” published today in Nature Neuroscience. Sleeping dragons 🦎 and functional ultrasound! Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/eWJHb 1/8
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiJust published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...
- Reposted by Roxana Zeraati"My New Year's Resolution is to find a principled way to think about all those cell types in the brain" Why friend, you are in luck, because @rgast.bsky.social has just the perspective for you: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiNow published in Biological Reviews! Continual decision‐making dynamics across biological organisms onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiAfter months of efforts, Moove is available for everyone to use! So happy for my lab :) Please check it out!
- Our python package for real-time targeting of birdsong syllables "Moove" is finally out! Thanks to my co-authors Nils Riekers, @goebl.bsky.social and Lena Veit. Our pre-print is online on biorxiv and our code is available on GitHub. Check it out! doi.org/10.64898/202... github.com/veitlab/moove
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiOut now in PLOS CB: a wonderful study by @nishantjoshi.bsky.social, together with Tansu Celikel and Sven van der Burg: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... Nishant shows here how classifying neurons based on electrophysiological properties depends critically on the input you give these neurons.
- Reposted by Roxana Zeraati🚨 Excited to end the year with a new preprint w/ Wenning Deng (not on bsky) and Dean Mobbs @fearbrain.bsky.social 🎉 🎉 "Blame and Compromise During Risky Dyadic Foraging" osf.io/preprints/ps... Feedback is very welcome! Thread: 🧵 1/n
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiToy models, just in time for Christmas! Excited to share my first article for @thetransmitter.bsky.social #neuroskyence
- Amid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs, writes @marcusghosh.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiSequences are everywhere! In every brain region. And are written in stone. Invariant Activity Sequences Across the Mouse Brain. Out today, by Célian Bimbard, with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social. Based on data by Célian and by @intlbrainlab.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiGoal selection through the lens of subjective functions: arxiv.org/abs/2512.15948 I welcome any feedback on these preliminary ideas.
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiIn a system subject to unobserved control, can you infer both the underlying dynamics and the control objective? 🤔 A year ago, I was presenting our work at IEEE CDC on solving this problem for stochastic LQR. arxiv.org/abs/2502.15014 Short 🧵 on the results, and how I think about them a year later.
- Reposted by Roxana Zeraati🚀 Excited to announce that I'm looking for people (PhD/Postdoc) to join my Cognitive Modelling group @uniosnabrueck.bsky.social. If you want to join a genuinely curious, welcoming and inclusive community of Coxis, apply here: tinyurl.com/coxijobs Please RT - deadline is Jan 4‼️
- In other news, I am now a ✨ COXI ✨ (cognitive scientist in Osnabrück, Germany) www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/campus-li... I'll be looking for PhD students & postdocs later this year, so watch this space if combining cognitive modelling, EEG & tFUS to study flexible cognition sounds exciting to you 🚀
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiHow do biological agents learn for the future? Our perspective piece on the value of prospective learning in neuroscience is finally out. This is part of a long running collaboration with @kordinglab.bsky.social & Josh Vogelstein (as well as many other people) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiBichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467
- Reposted by Roxana Zeraati(1/5) 🧵Our new preprint shows how the brain develops to transform how kids, teens & adults represent & navigate their world: shifting from local, moment-to-moment memories in childhood to integrated, global cognitive maps in adulthood 🧠 Paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiNew paper for #neurips2025! AI models adjust millions of internal settings to get better at a task. But how are these adjustments determined? For decades, we've mostly figured this out through trial & error. We took a different approach...🧵 (1/6) 🔗 openreview.net/forum?id=oMi...
- Reposted by Roxana Zeraati🚨new work with the dream team @danakarca.bsky.social @loopyluppi.bsky.social @fatemehhadaeghi.bsky.social @stuartoldham.bsky.social @duncanastle.bsky.social We use game theory and show the brain is not optimally wired for communication and there’s more to its story: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Roxana Zeraati½ New preprint reveals a twist in dopamine’s role: Cue-evoked dopamine in the Nucleus Accumbens core doesn’t just boost reward pursuit—it shapes how we pursue. #RewardSignals #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Reposted by Roxana Zeraati🚨New Kutlu Lab preprint! Excited to share our latest work led by Oyku Dinckol and Noah Wenger. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We find that ACh shapes DLS neural ensembles for outcome learning but is biased toward signaling threats over rewards 👇
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiNew paper alert!!...🤩 Led by @blogeman.bsky.social, we identify how cell type-specific hormonal responses in the hypothalamus tunes parenting behavior in males and females 🐭🧠🍼. Highlights in thread 👇 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiChimpanzees can remember the faces of friends and family for years, and sometimes even decades, according to research from 2023. #ScienceMagArchives scim.ag/4iPbuUd
- Reposted by Roxana Zeraati🥳Excited to share our latest human multipatch paper, now out in @natneuro.nature.com 🧠 We studied the cellular and synaptic physiology of human L2–3 pyramidal neurons and identified subtype-specific local connectivity rules across individuals. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Join us: penglab.de
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiOut now in @natphys.nature.com "The undervaluing of elite women in physics", with @weihuali.bsky.social and H Zheng, we show how election into prestigious academic societies has markedly different effects on the research prominence of women and men physicists /1 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiDirect Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... - thought-provoking (2019) paper from @urihasson.bsky.social and colleagues
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiIn this piece for @thetransmitter.bsky.social, I argue that ecological neuroscience should leverage generative video and interactive models to simulate the world from animals' perspectives. The technological building blocks are almost here - we just need to align them for this application. 🧠🤖
- Generative AI will offer a new way to see, simulate and hypothesize about how animals experience their worlds. In doing so, it could help bridge the long-standing gap between neural function and behavior, writes @shahabbakht.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiMissed our basal ganglia cell types webinar? Watch the recording over on our YouTube channel! 🧠📈 youtube.com/watch?v=nlZ0gp0eshc
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiAxolotls are famous for regenerating limbs. Turns out they can also regenerate their thymus—and that may show us how to someday to the same. That story and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiAnother 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 Roxana ZeraatiWe tend to think of neurons as either excitatory or inhibitory, but some neurons chemically inhibit their downstream targets while electrically exciting their neighbors. What is gained by having an inhibitory neuron excite its neighbor? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiThank you for having me on BrainInspired, Paul @braininspired.bsky.social! It was such an honor to be on my favorite show—a rare place where we can leisurely talk about manifolds, latent circuits, power laws, and other esoteric ideas, and still be taken seriously in knowing they are all real.
- Are manifolds real? Are latent circuits real? Tatiana @engeltatiana.bsky.social uses one, infers the other, and says yes to both. Also, how timescales are different and the same across the entire brain... braininspired.co/podcast/226/
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiWe used rabies virus 👾 to map how #psilocybin modifies long-range circuits 🧠, revealing network-specific reorganization that we didn’t expect. The full study is now online at Cell. @cp-cell.bsky.social Paper 👉 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Thread for a synopsis 👉 bsky.app/profile/alex...
- New preprint + thread 🧵 #Psychedelics induce the formation of new synapses, but where do they connect? Our rabies tracing study reveals that #psilocybin shifts connectivity across specific cortical networks. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/12
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiAre manifolds real? Are latent circuits real? Tatiana @engeltatiana.bsky.social uses one, infers the other, and says yes to both. Also, how timescales are different and the same across the entire brain... braininspired.co/podcast/226/
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiFinally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year: www.gao-unit.com/join-us/ If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply! I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮
- Reposted by Roxana ZeraatiIn our Learning Club @cmc-lab.bsky.social today (Dec 4, Thu, 2pm CET), @hritz.bsky.social will tell us about his recent paper (👇) [joint work w/ Jonathan Cohen lab]. Want to attend, send an empty email to virtual talk-link-request@cmclab.org to get the link!
- We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication. At first, what we found was very confusing! But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736 🧵
