Olivier Codol
Neuroscience, RL for motor learning, neural control of movement, NeuroAI.
Opinions stated here are my own, not those of my employer.
- Reposted by Olivier CodolThe Neural Control and Computation Lab is seeking a skilled part-time software engineer in Toronto to lead the development of ATHENA (Automatically Tracking Hands Expertly with No Annotations), our open-source, Python-based toolbox for 3D markerless tracking! www.yorku.ca/health/resea...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolWhy motor learning involves multiple systems: an algorithmic perspective biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
- Reposted by Olivier CodolGreat to see this paper on sensory expectations in motor control from @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @andpru.bsky.social out in Nature today! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience 🧪
- Reposted by Olivier CodolJoin us for Fall 2026. In our group, you can run studies from human behavior and neuroimaging, to large-scale NHP ephys, and join them up with a robust computational foundation. Bonus: you can help build the reading list.
- The Sensorimotor Superlab with @gribblelab.org and @andpru.bsky.social is a unique place to work and learn. We are now accepting MSc and PhD applications for Fall 2026. Join our awesome team at Western University... For application instructions see diedrichsenlab.org and gribblelab.org/join.html!
- Reposted by Olivier CodolThe Sensorimotor Superlab with @gribblelab.org and @andpru.bsky.social is a unique place to work and learn. We are now accepting MSc and PhD applications for Fall 2026. Join our awesome team at Western University... For application instructions see diedrichsenlab.org and gribblelab.org/join.html!
- Reposted by Olivier CodolCome share your passion about motor control, sensory systems, neurophysiology, neurotechnology, and more at #NCMKobe26 !!
- Happy to announce that as of this summer, I've joined the CTRL-Labs group at Meta Reality Labs as a Research Scientist! I've also relocated to the bustling city of New York, where I hope I can do my best work (and enjoy running in Central Park).
- While I'm sad to step away from my full-time academic work, the first few months have been fantastic—I'm enjoying doing exciting research at the scale possible in such an ambitious team and company. There's a lot to learn and I'm grateful for my inclusive colleagues enabling this experience.
- In my free time, I am wrapping up (a lot of) work and projects with former colleagues and friends. I will be communicating these as they come, so stay tuned!
- As always, thank you to my kind friends and mentors along the way, who make my journey not only possible but also fun and fulfilling.
- Reposted by Olivier CodolOur next paper on comparing dynamical systems (with special interest to artificial and biological neural networks) is out!! Joint work with @annhuang42.bsky.social , as well as @satpreetsingh.bsky.social , @leokoz8.bsky.social , Ila Fiete, and @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social : arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25943
- Reposted by Olivier Codol🚨🚨 We're hiring !! Looking for postdoc? Come work in an international, collaborative and stimulating environment on mechanisms of human upper limb motor control 👇👇👇 euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/386645
- Reposted by Olivier CodolA very nice contribution to the field, adding more evidence on how our expectations and goals shape upcoming motor commands. Congrats to the wonderful team!
- Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolI’m looking for interns to join our lab for a project on foundation models in neuroscience. Funded by @ivado.bsky.social and in collaboration with the IVADO regroupement 1 (AI and Neuroscience: ivado.ca/en/regroupem...). Interested? See the details in the comments. (1/3) 🧠🤖
- Reposted by Olivier CodolIf you're interested in dynamical systems analysis for neuroscience, definitely check out @oliviercodol.bsky.social 's revised version of our RL paper! Very cool results in the new Fig 6, worth it regardless of if you saw our previous version or if it's all new. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- A tad late (announcements coming) but very happy to share the latest developments in my previous preprint! Previously, we show that neural representations for control of movement are largely distinct following supervised or reinforcement learning. The latter most closely matches NHP recordings.
- Here’s our latest work at @glajoie.bsky.social and @mattperich.bsky.social ‘s labs! Excited to see this out. We used a combination of neural recordings & modelling to show that RL yields neural dynamics closer to biology, with useful continual learning properties. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- This similarity to NHP neural recordings was true for geometric similarity metrics (CCA), but also for dynamical similarity. Importantly, this was only evident when our models were trained to control biomechanistically realistic effectors.
- But alignment metrics can overlook the question of what gives rise to the differences they capture. We approached this using a now established framework in systems neuroscience, dynamical systems theory.
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View full threadAs always a huge thank you to my colleagues and supervisors @glajoie.bsky.social @mattperich.bsky.social and @nandahkrishna.bsky.social for helping make this work what it is—and making the journey so fun and interesting
- Reposted by Olivier CodolWestern study reveals brain’s predictive power. Researchers find neurons don’t wait for challenges to arise, they plan how to react. news.westernu.ca/2025/10/sens... #CdnPSE @westernu.ca
- Reposted by Olivier Codol🚨Job alert🚨 The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics" euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909
- Reposted by Olivier CodolWhat are the salient aspect of the LLM RL problem that could be abstracted into a benchmark? Tremendously large action space, sensitivity to numerical precision, prior policy that you must remain close to, what else?
- Reposted by Olivier Codol[This post could not be retrieved]
- Congrats to Jon for leading this work over the years! I’m very grateful I had the opportunity to take a small part in it, it was such great fun.
- Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolI'm really proud of being part of this paper - an amazing success for us in the Western Sensorimotor Superlab with @andpru.bsky.social @gribblelab.org! Congrats Jon!
- Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolStoked to see our study out in final form! Big kudos to @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social for driving this along for the past 5 years.
- Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolThrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolOur EMG Accessibility team made a very important visit! Thanks to Colin for the gracious hospitality and for the frank feedback on how to work toward a better product. We've got much more work to do and we have more updates to come. www.aestumanda.com/technology/2...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolWe will have an NHP position open at @westernu.ca this year. Posting is coming soon. If you're interested about our setup and the opportunities here, feel free to get in touch.
- Reposted by Olivier Codol🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.
- Reposted by Olivier Codol📰 I really enjoyed writing this article with @thetransmitter.bsky.social! In it, I summarize parts of our recent perspective article on neural manifolds (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), with a focus on highlighting just a few cool insights into the brain we've already seen at the population level.
- Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with competing and multifaceted information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations, writes @mattperich.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolFUNDING OPPORTUNITY: Motor Learning and Neuromotor Ethics Our Reality Labs EMG Foundational Research team is pleased to announce an RFP! The topic is on motor learning for EMG-based HCI and the related neuromotor ethics. Submissions are due September 1! www.meta.com/blog/reality...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolOpen-sourced EMG data plus training/testing scripts to make contact with our results at 100 users for each three tasks (discrete gestures, 1D wrist navigation, and handwriting). github.com/facebookrese...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolCareful dissection of motor sequence learning by @andpru.bsky.social and @mkashefi.bsky.social. In my humble opinion this should be an instant classic 😏. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolPleased to announce that our paper on "Identifying Neural Dynamics Using Interventional State Space Models" has been selected for a poster presentation in #ICML2025. Please check the thread for paper details (0/n). Presentation info: icml.cc/virtual/2025....
- Reposted by Olivier CodolComment: The brain works at more than 10 bits per second www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Olivier Codol1/N How do neural dynamics in motor cortex interact with those in subcortical networks to flexibly control movement? I’m beyond thrilled to share our work on this problem, led by Eric Kirk @eric-kirk.bsky.social with help from Kangjia Cai! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolWhich classical monkey reaching studies do you want replicated/investigated at mass-Neuropixel scale?
- Reposted by Olivier CodolOur new preprint from Rajan lab (Harvard): "Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments" Sophisticated & sometimes insect-like planning, exploration, predator evasion, and foraging strategies by DRL. arxiv.org/abs/2506.06981
- Reposted by Olivier CodolAll our motor control modelling efforts focus on closed-loop systems for this reason: "...closed-loop and open-loop training produce fundamentally different learning dynamics, even when using identical architectures and converging to the same final solution." arxiv.org/abs/2505.13567
- Reposted by Olivier CodolA warning: "Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time. It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems."
- Reposted by Olivier CodolJ'ai une question pour les francophones ici (ou n'importe qui si vous êtes bilingues): C'est quoi la meilleure façon de dire « It was a humbling experience » ? Il me semble qu'on n'a pas un mot qui est exactement équivalent à « humbling » en français...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolFred Crevecoeur @fredericcrevec1 🚨preprint time by @harikalidindi.bsky.social for our work on neural population dynamics: we show that features of neural population activity during reaching emerge from a simple linear body-network system 🧵👇 biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolScaling models across multiple animals was a major step toward building neuro-foundation models; the next frontier is enabling multi-task decoding to expand the scope of training data we can leverage. Excited to share our #ICLR2025 Spotlight paper introducing POYO+ 🧠 poyo-plus.github.io 🧵
- Reposted by Olivier CodolInterested in motor control or cerebellar function? We have two openings for graduate students for Fall 25. Join the sensorimotor superlab - our interdisciplinary research group Paul Gribble and Andrew Pruszynski. Application instructions at diedrichsenlab.org. Please repost 🙏
- Reposted by Olivier CodolTop-down feedback is ubiquitous in the brain and computationally distinct, but rarely modeled in deep neural networks. What happens when a DNN has biologically-inspired top-down feedback? 🧠📈 Our new paper explores this: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolJob Alert (please repost)! We are looking to hire a Research Assistant to join us in an exciting project looking into Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and how brains learn to control them.
- Reposted by Olivier CodolWe’re excited about this project! We present a model of motor savings without the need for context.
- Excited to share my latest work with @oliviercodol.bsky.social, supervised by @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @paulgribble.bsky.social, where we introduce a context-free model of savings in motor learning: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolExcited to share my latest work with @oliviercodol.bsky.social, supervised by @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @paulgribble.bsky.social, where we introduce a context-free model of savings in motor learning: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Olivier CodolHappening today at #COSYNE! Board 70.
- Reposted by Olivier CodolAt #Cosyne2025? Come by my poster today (3-047) to hear how sequential predictive learning produces a continuous neural manifold with the ability to generate replay during sleep, and spatial representations that "sweep" ahead to future positions. All from sensory information alone!
- Reposted by Olivier CodolThis week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @paulgribble.bsky.social #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor superlab.ca/posts/2025-03-28-li…
- Very excited for the upcoming Cosyne in Montreal! I’ll be presenting my poster [2-126] Brain-like neural dynamics for behavioral control develop through reinforcement learning, on the Friday session at 13:15. Feel free to drop by! The related pre-print is also out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
