Friedemann Zenke
Computational neuroscientist at the FMI.
www.zenkelab.org
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeOur work with @georgkeller.bsky.social on testing predictive processing (PP) models in cortex is out on biorvix now! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A short thread on our findings and thoughts on where we should move on from PP below.
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeThe hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeWith some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeJoint junior faculty position in Computational Neuroscience, between Ctr for Computational Neuroscience at @flatironinstitute.org and the CUNY Graduate Center @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social . Application deadline: 16 Jan 2026! www.simonsfoundation.org/flatiron/car... cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...
- I’m very grateful to the FMI, the tenure committee, inspiring colleagues, and all the hidden supporters who made this possible. Huge thanks to past and present group members for their curiosity and creativity. Excited for the next chapter.
- Huge congratulations to @fzenke.bsky.social on his promotion to Senior Group Leader! His team uses AI-powered models of neural networks to uncover how dynamic brain connections enable new memories. Learn more about his research in this video👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDu...
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- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeSpread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeFinally 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 🏖️🌮
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- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeJoint modelling of brain and behaviour dynamics with artificial intelligence www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Friedemann Zenke🚨New Preprint! How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715 + @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social 🧵 1/14
- 1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs. 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025... Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social
- 2/ RPL operates entirely in latent space, avoiding the anatomical issues of predictive coding models that compute prediction errors in input space. Instead, the network predicts future internal representations through a specific recurrent circuit structure.
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeExcited to see the paper fully published. It's an important milestone for training SNNs with exact gradients, replacing our earlier tricks of a "delay line augmentation" to capture temporal relationships. Delays can now be learnt alongside weights naturally. Amazing work @mbalazs98.bsky.social !
- Our paper on event-based delay learning is now published! @neworderofjamie.bsky.social @drtnowotny.bsky.social TL;DR: It’s now possible to train synaptic delays in large-scale spiking neural networks with high temporal precision—even in recurrent connections. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkePsst - 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 Friedemann ZenkeSpiking NN fans - the #SNUFA workshop (Nov 5-6) agenda is finalised and online now. Make sure to register (free) soon. (Note you can register for either day and come to both.) Agenda: snufa.net/2025/ Registration: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/snufa-2025... Thanks to all who voted on abstracts! 🤖🧠🧪
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeMessage for participants of the #SNUFA 2025 spiking neural network workshop. We got almost 60 awesome abstract submissions, and we'd now like your help to select which ones should be offered talks. Follow the "abstract voting" link at snufa.net/2025/ to take part. It should take <15m. Thanks! ❤️
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeInterested in doing a Ph.D. to work on building models of the brain/behavior? Consider applying to graduate schools at CU Anschutz: 1. Neuroscience www.cuanschutz.edu/graduate-pro... 2. Bioengineering engineering.ucdenver.edu/bioengineeri... You could work with several comp neuro PIs, including me.
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeI’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Truly honored (and a little overwhelmed) to see our work featured in The Transmitter's "This Paper Changed My Life." Huge thanks to @neural-reckoning.org for the kind words - and to our amazing community that keeps pushing spiking neural network research forward 🙏
- In our latest “This paper changed my life,” @neural-reckoning.org explains how @fzenke.bsky.social's 2019 paper, and its related coding tutorial SpyTorch, made it possible to apply modern machine learning to spiking neural networks. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeSubmissions (short!) due for SNUFA spiking neural networks conference in <2 weeks! 🤖🧠🧪 forms.cloud.microsoft/e/XkZLavhaJe More info at snufa.net/2025/ Note that we normally get around 700 participants and recordings go on YouTube and get 100s-1000s views. Please repost.
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeI am happy to finally share this preprint of my PhD project in @guillaumediss.bsky.social lab at the FMI in Basel. We used ddPCA to map the genetic architecture of the entire human bZIP interaction network. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thanks to all our co-authors for the great collaboration!
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeSpiking neural networks people, this message is for you! The annual SNUFA workshop is now open for abstract submission (deadline Sept 26) and (free) registration. This year's speakers include Elisabetta Chicca, Jason Eshraghian, Tomoki Fukai, Chengcheng Huang, and... you? snufa.net/2025/ 🤖🧠🧪
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- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeHere is your last reminder that the application deadline for Imbizo.Africa is nearing quickly, the 1st of July, in fact tomorrow. Still the place where diversity is at its best in the world! Tell all who need to hear. #africa #neuro
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeMy latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeHow does in-context learning emerge in attention models during gradient descent training? Sharing our new Spotlight paper @icmlconf.bsky.social: Training Dynamics of In-Context Learning in Linear Attention arxiv.org/abs/2501.16265 Led by Yedi Zhang with @aaditya6284.bsky.social and Peter Latham
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- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeWe just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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- 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
- 2/6 Existing theories of bio-plausible learning and credit assignment often rely on segregated dendrites to encode neuronal errors. However, not all neurons have morphologically well-separated dendrites while data-driven plasticity models seem at odds with such error modulated learning.
- Reposted by Friedemann Zenke*** Come join us !! We are recruiting !! *** How does the brain generate beliefs that go beyond direct experience? How do these mechanisms go awry in psychosis? The Barron lab tinyurl.com/bdf4drjf @MRCBNDU @NDCNOxford are recruiting a new postdoc tinyurl.com/ut4vbwt4 to work in mouse models
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeYour opportunity to apply for the #LakeConference on Neural Coding & Dynamics is going to set sail soon! 🛥️ Apply by May 23 to join us for this intimate, interactive conference. 📆 Sep. 28 to Oct. 2 📍 Seattle, USA 🧠📈 All career stages welcomed More info: alleninstitute.org/events/lake-...
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- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeHow should you combine sensory inputs with your internal predictions? Well, use uncertainty directly computed by your prediction-error circuits. Cool? Check out our Nat. Com. paper with Loreen Hertäg and @k47h4.bsky.social . www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeThe Clopath Lab has a fully funded PhD position open for Oct in Computational Neuroscience at Imperial College London. If you are interested, just send us an informal e-mail!
- Reposted by Friedemann Zenke⚡️ Excited to introduce ZAPBench, our #ICLR2025 spotlight: The Zebrafish Activity Prediction Benchmark measures progress in predicting neural activity within an entire vertebrate brain (70k+ neurons!) Explore interactive visualizations, datasets, code + paper: google-research.github.io/zapbench 🧠🧪
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- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeMy lab is looking for a computational neuroscience postdoctoral researcher: www.ru.nl/en/working-a... Come join us at the @dondersinst.bsky.social!
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeGrid cells have a geometry in time. Thanks to @azvollan.bsky.social l & @rjgardner.bsky.social for this heroic discovery. @ercresearch.bsky.social #KiloNeurons @m-bmoser.bsky.social @kavlintnu.bsky.social @nature.com @kavlifoundation.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Friedemann ZenkeWe're hiring! Join Meta Reality Lab's EMG Wristband foundational research team! ⚡️ We're seeking research scientists with systems neuro/ML/AI/BCI/EE backgrounds, with skills on a spectrum from modeling to experimental expertise, as well as generalists who excel in both areas.
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- Now published in @elife.bsky.social doi.org/10.7554/eLif... a fun collaboration with @clairemb90.bsky.social and Rainer Friedrich
