Dexter Tsin
PhD student, Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Current interests: social behavior, recurrent neural networks, computational ethology
- Reposted by Dexter TsinThe visual world is composed of objects, and those objects are composed of features. But do VLMs exploit this compositional structure when processing multi-object scenes? In our 🆒🆕 #ICLR2026 paper, we find they do – via emergent symbolic mechanisms for visual binding. 🧵👇
- Reposted by Dexter TsinOur paper on data constrained RNN that generalize to optogenetic perturbations now citable on eLife: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinWant to track the dynamics of estrogen in the brain across long periods of time? New paper as part of very fun collab with team UCLA Ed Van Veen and Steph Correa! We use a specialized optical reporter and show that this is possible and actually very easy! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Dexter Tsin🚨 We are recruiting a full-time Research Programmer to push forward several exciting machine learning projects in the lab! Work on computational behavior and joint neural/behavior models. Start date flexible, can be a pre-grad-school position or longer term. recruiting2.ultipro.com/SCR1003TSRI/...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinIn this episode of @braininspired.bsky.social, @engeltatiana.bsky.social discusses her modeling approach to discovering the connections between structure and function in the vast connectivity and activity patterns in the brain. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...
- Reposted by Dexter Tsin🚨Our work was accepted to the @neuripsconf.bsky.social : Data on the Brain & Mind workshop!🧠🦾"Massively Parallel Imitation Learning of Mouse Forelimb Musculoskeletal Reaching Dynamics" @talmo.bsky.social @eazim.bsky.social An imitation learning framework for modeling mouse forelimb control. 1/3
- Reposted by Dexter TsinHow 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 Dexter TsinJournal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, Editor-in-Chief, now reporting for duty. 🫡 Catch me at the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience Booth (3928) today and tomorrow from 2-3 pm if you want to chat about your manuscript or what JUNE is up to. #SfN2025 #SfN25 @sfn.org
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- Reposted by Dexter TsinThrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #blueprint 1/7
- Reposted by Dexter TsinExcited to share our new work with @engeltatiana.bsky.social! RNNs are often used to explore how the brain may solve specific tasks. We show that, depending on the architecture, RNNs find distinct circuit solutions, behaving differently when exposed to novel stimuli. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinA 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 Dexter TsinStoked to share our new review on why neuroendocrinology needs a systems lens and why hormones should matter to systems neuroscience. It’s time for serious cross-talk!
- Is it finally time for systems neuroscience to take hormones seriously? OMG YES! @meenakshiasokan.bsky.social and I share some of our thoughts about recent work in this review www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Check out this newest preprint from our lab 🥳 Multi-fiber + behavior quantification for the win
- Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪 1/12
- Reposted by Dexter TsinAnd we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinHow does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv
- Reposted by Dexter Tsin#Cosyne2026 is now open for business! Show us what you got both for the main meeting & workshop proposals 🧠🥳🧠🥳🧠
- Reposted by Dexter TsinSuper excited to share the first cooperative foraging paradigm in freely interacting mouse pairs! Stable leader and follower roles emerge spontaneously and predict learning. Well-trained mice show stereotyped, role-specific “behavioral motifs” absent in naive animals (1/5) doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinExcited to share our new preprint on the brain-wide organization of intrinsic timescales at single neuron resolution. Work w/ @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social, @intlbrainlab.bsky.social, Anna Levina, @engeltatiana.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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- Reposted by Dexter TsinCome work with us! @princetonneuro.bsky.social and the Department of Psychology at Princeton University are searching for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the area of human cognitive neuroscience, to be hired jointly in Psychology and Neuroscience: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinHow do animals decide if they should forage for food or stay home to take care of newborn offspring? Whose needs come first? For my PhD work now out in Nature, we examined how hunger and parenting neurons interact and are reshaped postpartum in mice 🧵⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinProposal recommended for funding! Which means we have a fresh, 3-year-funded position available for a computational postdoc interested in studying dynamics of social interactions in rats, with simultaneous Neuropixels data to follow 🐀🐀🐀 Proper job ad pending, but email me if interested!
- Reposted by Dexter Tsin(1/7) New preprint from Rajan lab! 🧠🤖 @ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social & Riley Simmons-Edler show–through cog sci, neuro & ethology–how an AI agent with fewer ‘neurons’ than an insect can forage, find safety & dodge predators in a virtual world. Here's what we built Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06981
- Reposted by Dexter Tsin📢🚨I’m elated to share that I’ll be starting as a tenure-track 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗿 👩🏻🏫 in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego this July! ☀️ @ucsandiego.bsky.social 1/ #ucsd #newprofessor #womeninSTEM
- Reposted by Dexter Tsin“Like a group of skiers descending a mountain, each [neuron] prefers a slightly different path, but all are shaped by the same slope,” says PNI's @engeltatiana.bsky.social on her lab’s new @nature.com study revealing how the brain makes decisions. 📰: pni.princeton.edu/news/2025/al...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinOut today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinThrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall! My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵
- Reposted by Dexter TsinVery happy to share the latest from my postdoc! 10 yrs of mouse social networks + 1.25 yrs of acoustic data ➡️ insight into vocalization & sociality in a wild population of your favorite lab model 🐁 paper: bit.ly/4n93yyD data: bit.ly/4lfFBEk code: bit.ly/4kNnMwx #bioacoustics #neuroskyence 1/8
- Reposted by Dexter TsinNow out in @natcomms.nature.com: Mice and monkeys spontaneously shift through comparable cognitive states - and it's written all over their faces! (1/7) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinThe firing of neural populations is high-dim even if their subthreshold activity is low-dim! This work by @bio-emergent.bsky.social and @haydari.bsky.social shows how, with a solvable model, a data analysis technique, and data from mouse visual cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinHow do we get more neuroscience out of our behavioral data? Excited to share new work with C.A.Baker, M.Murthy and @jpillowtime.bsky.social, where we use natural behavior data to extend predictions from neural recordings about population codes for dynamic social stimuli: tinyurl.com/2d3wwfyf
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- Reposted by Dexter Tsinwe're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team. publicusaresearchbenefits.com please share and re-share so we get more great stories in there!
- Reposted by Dexter TsinI’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026! I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory! RT appreciated! (1/5)
- Reposted by Dexter TsinHow do we associate the flavors we experience during a meal 🍽️😋 with postingestive effects like food poisoning 🤢🤮 that arise much later? Our answer in @nature.com this week: Illness signals from the gut reactivate and strengthen flavor representations in the amygdala. 📄: nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinProud to have contributed to @jiaxuanqi.bsky.social's masterpiece out @nature.com! She shows that dopamine transients track the learned quality of song during juvenile learning and that dopamine release is driven not just by VTA firing, but by a local cholinergic mechanism! (1/x)
- Reposted by Dexter TsinCalling all @cosynemeeting.bsky.social attendees! @neurokim.bsky.social, Sam Lewallen and I are organizing a 🔥🔥 workshop on graph approaches to neuroscience, including graph neural networks! For info see sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo...
- Reposted by Dexter TsinExcited to present the latest from the lab out today in Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex.... See Thread! 1/8
- Reposted by Dexter TsinOur latest findings on social behavior circuits is out: how does the brain responds to social isolation? Terrific work by @dingliu.bsky.social et al. uncovering a circuit with similar neural architecture as physiological needs (hunger, thirst, sleep..). Detailed thread soon. rdcu.be/ebo63
- Reposted by Dexter Tsin(1/11) Today I preprinted a lot of work from my postdoc with @dudman.bsky.social, which started with a question of how the nervous system balances flexibility with efficiency of learning. The thread below gives some background.... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Paper from the lab elucidating how RNNs use low dimensional circuit mechanisms to solve task. Watch this space for more interesting projects in the works 🥳 #neuroskyence
- (1/5) Excited to share my work with @engeltatiana.bsky.social , out now in Nat Neuro! We show that RNNs use low-d latent circuit mechanisms for cognitive tasks. We find that context-dependent decisions in both RNNs and PFC arise from latent inhibitory mechanisms. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
