Hadi Vafaii
Postdoc at UC Berkeley, Redwood Center | 🧠🤖 | 🎹 | 🎾 | mysterioustune.com
- Enough #Bayesplaining. It's time to start "deriving." We're unifying physics and neuroscience from first principles (yes, really). Come argue with me tomorrow @ 11 AM. @neuripsconf.bsky.social 🧠🤖🧠📈
- I will be at @neuripsconf.bsky.social Dec 2-8 to present our "Brain-like Variational Inference" paper 👇 Let's connect if you enjoy first-principles thinking and brain-inspired AI 🧠 🤖 Poster info: 📅 Wed, Dec 3, 11 AM — 2 PM 📍Exhibit Hall C,D,E #500 🔗 neurips.cc/virtual/2025... 🧵[1/4] 🧠🤖🧠📈
- I will be at @neuripsconf.bsky.social Dec 2-8 to present our "Brain-like Variational Inference" paper 👇 Let's connect if you enjoy first-principles thinking and brain-inspired AI 🧠 🤖 Poster info: 📅 Wed, Dec 3, 11 AM — 2 PM 📍Exhibit Hall C,D,E #500 🔗 neurips.cc/virtual/2025... 🧵[1/4] 🧠🤖🧠📈
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- Stop treating neurons as passive processors... They are active controllers! 🧠 🎮 In our latest Journal Club session, Thelonious Cooper presented "The neuron as a direct data-driven controller" by Moore et al., with special commentary from Mitya Chklovskii. 🎥 www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P7k... 🧠🤖🧠📈
- RL Debates 5: Anne "not everything is RL" Collins Anne delivered an amazing synthesis of her extensive work on how working memory shapes reward-based learning in humans. 📜 Read the paper: nature.com/articles/s41... 📽️ Watch the full presentation: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEqZ... 🧠🤖🧠📈
My paper is out! Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets. rdcu.be/eQjLN
- RL Debates 4: Adam "I literally measured value in the brain" Lowet Adam's talk covered a lot of ground — from his recent work on distributional RL (nature.com/articles/s41...) to a broader discussion of RL & the brain. 📽️ Watch the full meeting here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe7B... 🧠🤖🧠📈
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- RL Debates 3: Niels "you have 1000 brains in your brain" Leadholm See how Monty (a cortex-inspired model), crushes powerful ViTs in out-of-distribution & continual learning tasks—all while being millions of times more efficient in data & FLOPs! 📽️ Watch here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0FF... 🧠🤖🧠📈
- RL Debates 2: Fritz "learning for the sake of learning" Sommer Fritz introduced an information-theoretic, first-principles approach to modeling exploration through the maximization of "predicted information gain." 📽️ Watch the full presentation here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlF-... 🧠🤖🧠📈
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- Reposted by Hadi VafaiiWe started our RL debate series! www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0A0...
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- I'm excited to announce that we've added two more contenders to the RL Debate Series! - Anne Collins (Professor @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social) - Niels Leadholm (Research Manager @thousandbrains.org) Things are heating up!! See the flyer for details👇 🌎 sensorimotorai.github.io/debates/ 🧠🤖🧠📈
- What drives behavior in living organisms? And how can we design artificial agents that learn interactively? 📢 To address these, the Sensorimotor AI Journal Club is launching the "RL Debate Series"👇 w/ @elisennesh.bsky.social, @noreward4u.bsky.social, @tommasosalvatori.bsky.social 🧵[1/5] 🧠🤖🧠📈
- The first meeting of the 'RL Debate Series' is now on YouTube! Watch @elisennesh.bsky.social abolish the value function: youtube.com/watch?v=E0A0... 🧠🤖🧠📈
- What drives behavior in living organisms? And how can we design artificial agents that learn interactively? 📢 To address these, the Sensorimotor AI Journal Club is launching the "RL Debate Series"👇 w/ @elisennesh.bsky.social, @noreward4u.bsky.social, @tommasosalvatori.bsky.social 🧵[1/5] 🧠🤖🧠📈
- Reposted by Hadi VafaiiThe brain is incredibly densely connected. Human cerebral cortex may have as many as *one trillion* connections. Most of those cortical connections are recurrent, inside each area. What do they do? New paper from me in Annual Reviews: 🧪 🧠📈 1/ www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
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- Now accepted to #NeurIPS2025 - see y'all in sunny San Diego ☀️ Also, big thanks to our reviewers. Their deep reading of the paper and thoughtful feedback really helped sharpen our contributions. Stay tuned for a much-enhanced final version in a couple weeks!
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- What drives behavior in living organisms? And how can we design artificial agents that learn interactively? 📢 To address these, the Sensorimotor AI Journal Club is launching the "RL Debate Series"👇 w/ @elisennesh.bsky.social, @noreward4u.bsky.social, @tommasosalvatori.bsky.social 🧵[1/5] 🧠🤖🧠📈
- In the second meeting of 'Sensorimotor AI Journal Club' we covered: 📜 (B)ayesian (O)nline learning in (N)on-stationary (E)nvironments (BONE; openreview.net/forum?id=ose...) Many thanks to the first author Gerardo for an amazing presentation! 🎥 watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=49PP... 🧠🤖🧠📈
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- Our first 'Sensorimotor AI Journal Club' meeting was a blast! (...which, we might as well just call the "AI Club for Non-conformists"👇😎) 📽️ full presentation: youtube.com/watch?v=efc7... 🧵[1/4] 🧠🤖🧠📈
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- Announcing the new "Sensorimotor AI" Journal Club — please share/repost! w/ Kaylene Stocking, Tommaso Salvatori, and @elisennesh.bsky.social Sign up link: forms.gle/o5DXD4WMdhTg... More details below 🧵[1/5] 🧠🤖🧠📈
- We're creating a community for researchers who value deep scientific understanding in addition to state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our focus is on foundational papers at the intersection of neuroscience and AI 🧠🤖 🧵[2/5]
