iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

At this rate, ML conferences are just based on whether an LLM thinks a paper should be accepted/rejected. What's the point then? I, too, can run my paper through Astra, and ask it to review it. There's 0 added benefit waiting months just to have some other reviewer do the same.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The “AI is fake” crowd watching a plane take off:

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Reposted by Aran Nayebi

Yang Tan Collective @yangtancollective.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Former Yang ICoN Fellow and current assistant professor in the CMU School of Computer Science Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social talks about neuroscience + AI in Does Compute, a podcast presented by Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and GeekWire Studios. Watch ⬇️

youtube.com

Very Much Inspired By the Nervous System

YouTube video by GeekWire

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Check out the CMU SCS podcast episode highlighting our lab's work on reverse-engineering natural intelligence with autonomous agents: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U7S...

youtube.com

Very Much Inspired By the Nervous System

YouTube video by GeekWire

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Happy 44th birthday today to the :-) emoticon, first emoted at 11:44 am ET on Sept. 19, 1982 by CMU Professor Scott Fahlman. I got to meet him earlier this week, where he graciously signed our :-) shirts. “What do you work on? LLMs?” I said neuroscience. “So Real I. Faculty keep getting younger.” 😂

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

If you're interested in the discussions around the merits of NeuroAI for understanding the mind & brain, check out our #CCN2026 GAC Debate recording! www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYES...

youtube.com

CCN 2026 | GAC: NeuroAI Methods & Frameworks

YouTube video by Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

CMU is hiring an Assistant Professor in NeuroAI! Come join our awesome NeuroAI community 🧠🤖: apply.interfolio.com/189268

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

If you are attending @UncertaintyInAI #UAI2026 in Amsterdam, I will be presenting this work on "What Capable Agents Must Know" tomorrow (Tuesday) in the poster session as Poster #205! Poster below 👇 if you can't make it: anayebi.github.io/files/poster...

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Version 2 of Theory of Contravariance w/ @dyamins.bsky.social is out! New material on contravariance for Transformers, and the theory of Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) and centered kernel analysis (CKA)/Procrustes.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Now accepted to the AI, Ethics, and Society 2026 conf under the new title: "When Do AI Gains Become Broadly Shareable?" With all the rapid progress in AI, it is critical to now rigorously characterize the institutional conditions that allow gains from greater AI capability to be broadly shared.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

If anyone ever asks you: "What has AI/NeuroAI taught us about the brain?" Here's a (woefully incomplete!) list of what you can say:

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Why, according to Terry Tao, the recent disproof of the Jacobian conjecture in N > 2 dimensions was not mere brute force and required what many mathematicians would characterize as "creative insight" had a human come up with it!

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

The blogpost exposition on our "zippering theorems" in Section 4 from our recent Contravariance Theory paper is now out! These zippering theorems explain why end-to-end optimization for downstream tasks often seems to strongly constrain upstream representations.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

1/6 Why have deep neural networks aligned so strongly with brains for the past 15 years? What explains it? @dyamins.bsky.social & I make progress on this question in our new paper👇 In a nutshell, we *prove* that for sufficiently hard tasks, the choice of alignment metric does *not* matter.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Had a blast presenting our virtual zebrafish paper at #FENS2026 in Barcelona in the "Computational Astroscience" symposium -- the first autonomous agent that can predict *whole-brain* neural-glial data!

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Audrey Denizot @adenizot.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

We're at @fens.org! #FENS2026 #FENSGlia Posters: PS02-07PM-558, PS03-08AM-495, PS05-09AM-674. Delighted to be presenting at the S44 Computational astroscience symposium on Thursday with T. Fellin, @anayebi.bsky.social & T. Papouin. Thanks @inbalgoshen.bsky.social for organizing, looking forward!

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

In case you want to learn more about AI safety this 4th, check out the recent recording of some of my group's work on the AI Safety Research directory! www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWQJ...

youtube.com

Corrigibility and the ROGUE Benchmark with Prof. Nayebi, NeuroAgents Lab

YouTube video by AI Safety Research Directory

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

UAI 2026 Camera ready up on arXiv as v3! I've written a long-form LW blogpost on how the technical aspects of this work connect to NeuroAI and to AI sentience/welfare, entitled: "What Capable Agents Must Know: Why AI Consciousness May Be an Inevitable Byproduct of Capability"

lesswrong.com

What Capable Agents Must Know: Why AI Consciousness May Be an Inevitable Byproduct of Capability — LessWrong

[No LLMs were used (or harmed!) in the writing of this blogpost!] Technical results can all be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02491 …

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

How did Aumann's agreement theorem come to be? I've uploaded the full video👇from Nobel laureate Bob Aumann's 96th birthday conference in Paris, celebrating 50 years of “Agreeing to Disagree.” At 1:11:09, I ask Aumann about meeting von Neumann & Morgenstern, their influence on his career,

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

My AAAI 26 talk on the first formal guarantees on corrigibility and the limits of safety filters is now online: underline.io/lecture/1442...

underline.io

Core Safety Values for Provably Corrigible Agents

On-demand video platform giving you access to lectures from conferences worldwide.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Honored to meet Nobel laureate Bob Aumann & speak on AI safety in Paris at his 96th birthday celebration: Half a Century of “Agreeing to Disagree”. Scott and I met him here for the first time. When Scott mentioned Aumann Hall at Lighthaven, Bob said: “I guess I’ve made it then!”

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Now accepted to #UAI2026 (@auai.org)! Check out v2 of the paper on arXiv with explicit world model recovery algorithms under partial observability in Theorems 3-4. See you in Amsterdam in August!

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

In this era of AI doomerism, misinformation, and fear-mongering, this quote by Marie Curie is more prescient than ever: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." Here's to understanding more.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Wow! This is a *must-watch* for anybody interested in modern AI today and where it's going, with talks from rockstars—that include 3 Turing Award winners (Dana Scott being the 4th in attendance!)—on topics such as: AI safety (Ron Rivest), using AI in research and improving reliability (Les Valiant👇

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

I'll be giving a talk on our virtual zebrafish at this conference -- apply now to check out the other awesome talks & speakers as well!

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

I’ll be presenting this work (AAAI '26 Oral) in honor of Nobel-Prize-winning economist Robert Aumann's 96th birthday in Paris! Come find out why aligning to all human values is infeasible & reward hacking is inevitable! Program (w/ Steven Pinker & others!): game-theory.u-paris2.fr/WS2026-progr...

game-theory.u-paris2.fr

Game Theory and Language

Language

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Satpreet (Sat) Singh @satpreetsingh.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Talk recordings from our CoSyNe 2026 workshop on Agent-based Models in Neuroscience are now online! Playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... RL agents and theory, interoception, biomechanical models connectome-constrained models, and more. #CoSyNe #NeuroAI #CompNeuro #RL #EmbodiedAI

youtube.com

CoSyNe 2026 Agents in Neuroscience Workshop - YouTube

https://neuro-agent-models.github.io/

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Honored to be quoted in this great reporting by @theroberthart.bsky.social on getting the facts straight here. No, this is *not* a fly uploaded to a computer, and in fact imitation learning via RL from fly behavior was responsible for the intelligent behavior, not the "uploaded" pseudo-connectome :)

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

If you're at #Cosyne2026, stop by @reecedkeller.bsky.social's poster tonight (Poster 1-034) and ask him questions! :)

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

If you're attending @cosynemeeting.bsky.social, come check out our NeuroAgents workshop on Tuesday March 17! Speakers: Omri Barak, Cristina Savin, @lilweb.bsky.social @reecedkeller.bsky.social Caroline Haimerl, Hannah Choi @xaqlab.bsky.social Srini Turaga, Yanan Sui, @trackingskills.bsky.social 👇

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

1/ As AI agents become increasingly capable, what must *inevitably* emerge inside them? We prove selection theorems: strong task performance forces world models, belief-like memory and—under task mixtures—persistent variables resembling core primitives associated with emotion.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Want to learn how to build your own biologically-plausible temporal neural networks (TNNs)? Check out the PyTorchTNN tutorial, prepared by my students @trinityjchung.com and Yuchen Shen! 👇 colab.research.google.com/drive/11QuXu... Check out the thread below for a high-level overview 👇

colab.research.google.com

Google Colab

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

PyTorchTNN tutorial (prepared by my students @trinityjchung.com and Yuchen Shen): colab.research.google.com/drive/11QuXu... Slides from today's talk: anayebi.github.io/files/slides...

colab.research.google.com

Google Colab

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Looking forward to presenting on "How behavior shapes recurrent circuits across sensory systems and species: from vision to touch" at the University of Chicago Neuroscience and ML workshop on Wednesday! Details below 👇🧵

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

It was breathtaking to see this view from your balcony in real life yesterday! :)

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

One thing that’s often underappreciated is that task-optimized models seed neural foundation modeling because they’re so much more efficient to train than only on brain data — the brain data ends up being the cherry on top for fine-tuning.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

I'll be presenting my work *today* on the first formal guarantees addressing the decade-long open problem of Corrigibility (namely how we provably avoid loss of control with AI) in the AAAI Machine Ethics workshop (W37) at 15:15 pm ST in Tourmaline 207-209!

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

If you're attending AAAI, I'll be presenting this work on alignment barriers *today* as an Oral presentation in the Special Track on AI Alignment at 11 am ST in conference room J!

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

It was a pleasure speaking at the inaugural BAMΞ Mathematical Phenomenology Sprint, where I discussed reverse-engineering natural intelligence with embodied agents and how NeuroAI could inform a science of subjective experience and welfare.

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

It was an absolute pleasure giving the University of Toronto Robotics Institute seminar on "Using Embodied Agents to Reverse-Engineer Natural Intelligence". Check out the recording here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Qm...

youtube.com

U of T Robotics Institute Seminar: Aran Nayebi (CMU)

YouTube video by University of Toronto Robotics Institute

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Feel free to check out my new LessWrong post for a high-level summary of our two AAAI papers! "From Barriers to Alignment to the First Formal Corrigibility Guarantees" www.lesswrong.com/posts/M5owRc...

lesswrong.com

From Barriers to Alignment to the First Formal Corrigibility Guarantees — LessWrong

This post summarizes two related papers that will appear at AAAI 2026 in January: …

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

...and that's a wrap for Fall 2025! In the final lecture of the semester, Matt Gormley & I covered bleeding-edge research topics in Generative AI, namely Interactive World Models + Science of AI Alignment. Next semester we plan to have our recordings publicly available on YouTube -- stay tuned!

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Aran Nayebi @anayebi.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

We have 2 papers accepted to #AAAI2026 this year! The first paper 👇 on intrinsic barriers to alignment (establishing no free lunch theorems of encoding "all human values" & the inevitability of reward hacking) will appear as an *oral* presentation at the Special Track on AI Alignment.

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