Related papers: Discovering Mechanistic Models of Neural Activity:…
Autonomy is a hallmark of animal intelligence, enabling adaptive and intelligent behavior in complex environments without relying on external reward or task structure. Existing reinforcement learning approaches to exploration in reward-free…
The cognitive sciences aim to understand intelligence by formalizing underlying operations as computational models. Traditionally, this follows a cycle of discovery where researchers develop paradigms, collect data, and test predefined…
The tracing of neural pathways through large volumes of image data is an incredibly tedious and time-consuming process that significantly encumbers progress in neuroscience. We are exploring deep learning's potential to automate…
Zebrafish embryos are a valuable model for drug discovery due to their optical transparency and genetic similarity to humans. However, current evaluations rely on manual inspection, which is costly and labor-intensive. While machine…
Neural dynamics underlie behaviors from memory to sleep, yet identifying mechanisms for higher-order phenomena (e.g., social interaction) is experimentally challenging. Existing whole-brain models often fail to scale to single-neuron…
Despite the recent success of neural network models in mimicking animal performance on visual perceptual tasks, critics worry that these models fail to illuminate brain function. We take it that a central approach to explanation in systems…
Understanding the complexity of biological neural networks like the human brain is one of the scientific challenges of our century. The organization of the brain can be described at different levels, ranging from small neural networks to…
Despite the success of neural networks at solving concrete physics problems, their use as a general-purpose tool for scientific discovery is still in its infancy. Here, we approach this problem by modelling a neural network architecture…
Automated methods for discovering mechanistic simulator models from observational data offer a promising path toward accelerating scientific progress. Such methods often take the form of agentic-style iterative workflows that repeatedly…
Mechanistic models encode scientific knowledge about dynamical systems and are widely used in downstream scientific and policy applications. Recent work has explored LLM-based agentic frameworks to automatically construct mechanistic models…
Data-driven benchmarks have led to significant progress in key scientific modeling domains including weather and structural biology. Here, we introduce the Zebrafish Activity Prediction Benchmark (ZAPBench) to measure progress on the…
Discovering symbolic representations for skills is essential for abstract reasoning and efficient planning in robotics. Previous neuro-symbolic robotic studies mostly focused on discovering perceptual symbolic categories given a pre-defined…
Scientific modeling faces a tradeoff between the interpretability of mechanistic theory and the predictive power of machine learning. While existing hybrid approaches have made progress by incorporating domain knowledge into machine…
*Automated circuit discovery* is a central tool in mechanistic interpretability for identifying the internal components of neural networks responsible for specific behaviors. While prior methods have made significant progress, they…
Recent works exploring deep learning application to dynamical systems modeling have demonstrated that embedding physical priors into neural networks can yield more effective, physically-realistic, and data-efficient models. However, in the…
Computational modeling and simulation have become essential tools in the quest to better understand the brain's makeup and to decipher the causal interrelations of its components. The breadth of biochemical and biophysical processes and…
Collective movements are pervasive behaviours among social organisms and have led to the development of many models. However, modelling animal trajectories and social interactions in simple bounded environments remains a challenge.…
Recent studies on reasoning in language models (LMs) have sparked a debate on whether they can learn systematic inferential principles or merely exploit superficial patterns in the training data. To understand and uncover the mechanisms…
Delineating how animal behavior arises from neural activity is a foundational goal of neuroscience. However, as the computations underlying behavior unfold in networks of thousands of individual neurons across the entire brain, this…
Better understanding the natural world is a crucial task with a wide range of applications. In environments with close proximity between humans and animals, such as zoos, it is essential to better understand the causes behind animal…