NEW in the #KempnerInstitute blog: Want consistent & stable #SAE concepts across training runs? Archetypal SAE anchors concepts in the real data’s convex hull and delivers consistent & stable dictionaries! Read the blog: bit.ly/4kEAJZN

#VSS2025 | Vision Sciences Society is Honored to Present Jody Culham with the 2025 Davida Teller Award! For more information about Dr. Culham and the Davida Teller Award, please visit visionsciences.org/2025-davida-te…

saying “no circuits” is like claiming there are no roads in a city, just cars moving around. sure, traffic depends on where people go — but some paths get paved. put differently: meaning may be relational, but some relations — like induction heads and edge detectors —

🎙️ Next up in the NeuroAI Emerging Leaders Webinar Series! We’re thrilled to host Andy Keller on May 8th, sharing his latest work at the frontier of NeuroAI. 📍 Register for free! shorturl.at/Ps8ID 🔗 Find out more: neuroai-workshop.github.io/NeuroAI_Webina…

The Brady Lab will be at #VSS2025 VSS Meeting this year! Here's a thread with some of the cool work we're coming to share:

Our computer vision textbook is now available for free online here: visionbook.mit.edu We are working on adding some interactive components like search and (beta) integration with LLMs. Hope this is useful and feel free to submit Github issues to help us improve the text!

To help computational cognitive scientist engage with more naturalistic experiments, I've made NiceWebRL. NiceWebRL is a Python library for designing human subject experiments that leverage machine reinforcement learning environments. github.com/KempnerInstitu…

🧵 What if two images have the same local parts but represent different global shapes purely through part arrangement? Humans can spot the difference instantly! The question is can vision models do the same? 1/15

A team from #KempnerInstitute, Harvard SEAS & Computer Science at UT Austin has won a best paper award at #ICML2025 for work unlocking the potential of masked diffusion models. Congrats to Jaeyeon (Jay) Kim @ICML, Kulin Shah, Vasilis Kontonis, Sham Kakade and Sitan Chen. kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/news/kempner-i… #AI

In this piece published in The Hill, fellow Turing laureate David Patterson points out that the return on investment of government-funded research in universities is gigantic. Cutting the budgets of NSF and NIH is economic suicide. thehill.com/opinion/techno…

Very excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! See below for my two presentations -- a talk today and a poster Friday. Come say hi!

#CCN2025 begins tomorrow! Check out the presentations from the #kempnerinstitute. #NeuroAI #neuroscience

Applications are now open for our #KempnerInstitute Research Fellowships! Postdocs studying the foundations of #intelligence or applications of #AI are encouraged to apply. Learn more and apply by Oct. 1: bit.ly/3UvpSpe #LLMs #NeuroAI #ML Sham Kakade Bernardo Sabatini

🧵 Can a purely feedforward network — with no recurrence or lateral connections — capture human-like perceptual organization? 🤯 Yes! Especially for contour integration, and we pinpoint the key inductive biases. New paper in PLOS Comp Biol with talia konkle & George Alvarez! 1/24

Excited to share that our paper has been accepted at #NeurIPS2025 ! Huge thanks to all my collaborators 🙌 Check out the details in the thread below ⬇️

Dream research environment. Seriously. Feel free to DM if you have any question 🤠

Excited to share new work with Haemy Lee Masson @hleemasson.bsky.social, Ericka Wodka, Stewart Mostofsky and Leyla Isik! We investigated how simultaneous vision and language signals are combined in the brain using naturalistic+controlled fMRI. Read the paper here: osf.io/b5p4n 1/n

Proud to release ShinkaEvolve, our open-source framework that evolves programs for scientific discovery with very good sample-efficiency! 🐙 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.19349 Blog: sakana.ai/shinka-evolve/ Project: github.com/SakanaAI/Shink…

Your pupils don’t just track light. They are a doorway to the dynamics of your entire brain. A new Nature paper shows pupil size alone can reconstruct second-by-second brain activity.

Current theories of consciousness are 'meat-neutral', but if specific physical substrates are necessary, AI may never achieve consciousness. Understanding whether consciousness depends on computational roles, 5/