Rui Ponte Costa

Rui Ponte Costa

@somnirons.bsky.social

Computational neuroscientist bringing machine and neural learning closer together [Oxford NeuroAI] @ox.ac.uk @oxforddpag.bsky.social 🇵🇹🇪🇺🇬🇧🌳 neuralml.github.io www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/neuroai

2K followers350 following96 posts

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Tim Behrens
@behrenstimb.bsky.social

Super proud of many things about this work by the amazing @kristorpjensen.bsky.social. The work is one of my favourite things ever from the lab. Also super proud of Kris for choosing to send it to @elife.bsky.social - we get to see Kris explain every figure! elifesciences.org/articles/109...

elifesciences.orgA mechanistic theory of planning in prefrontal cortexRecently discovered sequence representations in prefrontal cortex can be combined with the ubiquitous principle of neural attractor dynamics to support planning in complex environments.

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Laureline Logiaco
@laurelinelogiaco.bsky.social

Interested in a Ph.D. in comp neuro? Consider applying to CU Anschutz. Our community is growing with groups led by Nick Lesica, @teissa.bsky.social , Christopher Cueva, and myself! Topics: neural dynamics, circuit & behavioral modeling, neuroAI, closed-loop neurostim. Links below #CompNeuro #NeuroAI

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Cerebellum Science Center
@cerebellumcenter.bsky.social

The cerebellum isn’t just about movement; it gates social communication! Huge congrats to Dr. Cheryl Brandenburg (Sillitoe Lab), who led this work with her creativity and determination. We can’t wait to see where she takes this research in her own lab @lsu.bsky.social #neuroskyence tinyurl.com/CBSCO

tinyurl.comFrequency-dependent cerebellar circuits independently gate social vocalizations and movementBiological sciences; Behavioral neuroscience

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Blake Richards
@tyrellturing.bsky.social

Our paper on exponentiated gradient (EG) learning is now out at Neuron! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... We show that EG naturally respects Dale's law and produces networks that are a better phenomenlogical fit to biological networks. Congrats to @repromancer.bsky.social for getting this out! 🧠📈 🧪

cell.comExponentiated gradient learning yields brain-like synaptic distributionsCornford et al. show that exponentiated gradient (EG) learning, which updates synapses multiplicatively, matches gradient descent on cognitive tasks while respecting Dale’s law and producing brain-lik...
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Rui Ponte Costa
@somnirons.bsky.social

The shared space clusters by image category, inherited from the ResNet-50 scaffold. This is not a property of the RN-50 architecture alone: Untrained ResNet-50: retrieval drops from 46.2% to 6.6%. Shuffled neural data–model feature 1:1 correspondence: 1.0% (chance 0.8%). 4/6

Rui Ponte Costa
@somnirons.bsky.social

Adding a new subject is cheap: we freeze the shared space and train only a new subject encoder/decoder on their own images. With 20% of the new subject's data, we recover ~98% of the alignment reached with all of it, and 90% of the noise ceiling in self-reconstruction. 5/6

Rui Ponte Costa
@somnirons.bsky.social

In our MED-VAE architecture a common space arises by using a pretrained ResNet-50 as a scaffold onto which subjects brain activity can align to. Our method does not require common inputs across individuals and after training, the Resnet is no longer needed. 2/6

Rui Ponte Costa
@somnirons.bsky.social

Our method outperforms previous approaches: Top-1 retrieval (another person's closest latent is the same image): 46.2% vs 21.8% (SRM), 18.4% (Procrustes) Representational similarity analysis (RSA) across subjects' latent representations: 0.63 vs 0.41 3/6

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COSYNE
@cosynemeeting.bsky.social

Abstract submission closes soon, so you should start if you haven't yet 😉 #COSYNE2027

COSYNE@cosynemeeting.bsky.social

📢Have work to share with the computational and systems neuroscience community? Abstract submissions for #COSYNE2027 are now open. Deadline: 18 October 2026, 11:59 p.m. AoE Submit your abstract: www.cosyne.org/abstracts-su... #Neuroscience

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Shervin Safavi
@neuroprinciplist.bsky.social

Re-post 🔁 is appreciated! #neurojobs: we’re looking for new team members to join us @cmc-unit.bsky.social!
If you’d like to study decision-making in naturalistic & embodied contexts (integrating RL, RNNs & cross-species data analysis) in a cool & collaborative research environment 😎, check 👇

Roxana Zeraati@roxana-zeraati.bsky.social

Link to ads: Postdoc position: nextcloud.tuebingen.mpg.de/index.php/s/... PhD position: nextcloud.tuebingen.mpg.de/index.php/s/... We’re also both at @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social and happy to chat!

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

neurosock
@neurosock.bsky.social

To pursue extended goals, the PFC monitors performance and the value of cognitive control, thus preventing goal abandonment. #AI models struggle with #hallucinations because they lack this monitoring circuit--forcing #engineers to reinvent it as an agent "harness". #Neuroscience

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Botos Csabi
@botoscsabi.bsky.social

[Hugging Face release] We’re releasing the dataset behind Reason to Play! I’m incredibly proud of our team for reaching this milestone.

Rui Ponte Costa
@somnirons.bsky.social

Great summary of our paper with @mark-j-wagner.bsky.social

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social

Cerebellar granule cells, which outnumber all other neurons in the brain combined, help the brain to generalize to new situations and distinguish between contexts simultaneously. By Holly Barker www.thetransmitter.org/cerebellum/c...

thetransmitter.orgCerebellum discerns similar actions by reorienting activityThe findings provide a new perspective on how granule cells in the cerebellum help to generalize across tasks.

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Guillaume Bellec
@bellecguill.bsky.social

I have a postdoc position open in my NeuroAi lab in Vienna 👌👾🧪🧠 And I will be at Bernstein (workshop only), please reach out if you are interested

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Nico Schuck
@nicoschuck.bsky.social

2023: 8,039 proposals 2024: 10,360 proposals 2025: 17,066 proposals 2026: 21,627 proposals Something's gotta give

Iva Vukušić@vukusiciva.bsky.social

This ridiculous number of applications is, in my view, the result of 2 nightmare developments happening concurrently 1.the precariousness of the job market for young PhD graduates which then fuels further: 2.the AI tools enabling overproduction of proposals. #Research #ERC #ResearchFunding #Academia

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Drew Schreiner
@schreinerdrew.bsky.social

I’m on the faculty job market this fall! 🐦🧠 I’m an NIH K99/R00 awardee studying how the brain learns complex skills, using birdsong to connect molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior & computation. Know of a search where I might fit? Please send it my way & share!

drewschreiner.github.ioDrew Schreiner, Ph.D. | Neuroscience of LearningI use birdsong to understand how the brain learns complex skills across molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior, and computation. On the 2026–27 faculty job market.

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Sam Gershman
@gershbrain.bsky.social

If this makes you mad, submit your cognitive science research to @openmindjournal.bsky.social No APCs, no subscription fees. It's funded by university libraries, at low cost.

Eric Schares@eschares.bsky.social

🚨Update: Our analysis of global APC expenditure has now been expanded to cover more publishers (7 -> 14) and more years (2019-2025). We estimate $15B in APCs paid over seven years, $3.7B in 2025 alone. Elsevier crosses the $1B threshold by itself in 2025. arxiv.org/abs/2608.16322 #ScholComm

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Earl K. Miller
@earlkmiller.bsky.social

The cortex and cerebellum split the labor: the cortex provides a stable, general-purpose movement blueprint, while the cerebellum reorients that same blueprint differently for each context Granule cells reorient cortical trajectories to separate contexts www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

nature.comGranule cells reorient cortical trajectories to separate contexts - NatureSimultaneous imaging of premotor cortex and cerebellar granule cells in mice learning two skills in parallel shows that trajectories generalize in cortex but coherently reorient apart in granule cells...

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The Royal Society
@royalsociety.org

The Ferrier Medal and Lecture 2027 is awarded to Professor Kenneth Daniel Harris for his contributions to neuroscience by unifying experimental neurophysiology with advanced analytical methods and for pioneering methods that allow recording from thousands of neurons. #RSMedals https://bit.ly/4qCJZRo

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Nicole Rust
@nicolecrust.bsky.social

Oh wow! @thetransmitter.bsky.social amplified recent Bsky chatter about the dire US grant landscape. Thank you, @emilysingerneuro.bsky.social 🙏.

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social

Two years into one of the most tumultuous tenures in U.S. federal funding, researchers outline how they are coping with ongoing changes and reflect on the impact these changes are having on the system more broadly. By @emilysingerneuro.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/funding/amid...

thetransmitter.orgAmid funding uncertainty, neuroscientists report a mix of cynicism, persistenceTwo years into one of the most tumultuous tenures in U.S. federal funding, researchers outline how they are coping with ongoing changes and reflect on the impact these changes are having on the system...

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Anna Schapiro
@annaschapiro.bsky.social

Yay, the field needs this! Excited to serve as an associate editor!

Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB)@mmb-journal.bsky.social

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

direct.mit.eduMinds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press

Rui Ponte Costa reposted

Marcelo Mattar
@marcelomattar.bsky.social

Very excited to attend #CCN2026 this week and to present various projects from my lab! Here's a list of our posters and talks in case you'd like to see what we've been up to.

Rui Ponte Costa
@somnirons.bsky.social

Totally agree with this perspective. We need to consider how intelligence arises in the first place if we want to reproduce it — learning principles are critical.

Vlad Ayzenberg@vayzenb.bsky.social

Excited to share our review in @cp-neuron.bsky.social with @lauriebayet.bsky.social and @mickbonner.bsky.social! We describe how implementing principles from child development can advance the mechanistic plausibility and capacities of AI models We packed A LOT into this review, here's a quick 🧵

Rui Ponte Costa
@somnirons.bsky.social

Really cool illustration of our paper. @neurosock.bsky.social's great work!

neurosock@neurosock.bsky.social

This recent post by @earlkmiller.bsky.social got my attention. It shows how abstraction could emerge in the primate PFC. The paper is hard, but the main idea can be simplified to low-dims, so I made fun a little animation. A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

Rui Ponte Costa
@somnirons.bsky.social

I would totally like to second this. Huge congrats to Michał Wójcik who has managed to get this over the line despite the huge challenges!

Seán Froudist-Walsh@seanfw.bsky.social

Great to see Mark Stokes getting acknowledged , and also the author senior authors who stepped in, but I’d like to highlight 1st author Michał Wojcik who completed this excellent work from his PhD under such difficult circumstances. He‘s got more good stuff in the pipeline - one to watch