iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Mariya Toneva @mtoneva.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

🚨 Two open postdoc positions in the ERC-funded project BrainAlign at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbruecken, Germany: position #1 on NeuroAI: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/58480 position #2 on human-centered LLM evaluations: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/58481 Application deadline: Oct 13, 2026

11911

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Understanding how learners conclude “X laughed Y” is incorrect is an age-old question, with several hypotheses, some of which have been ~impossible to disentangle! @tomyxw.bsky.social, @fredashi.bsky.social, and I use controlled rearing to shed light on this in our new EMNLP paper: 1/n

Title slide for “Disentangling Statistical Preemption from Entrenchment in Language Models’ Avoidance of Overgeneralization,” by Yixuan Wang, Freda Shi, and Kanishka Misra. Includes the main results plot and experimental design.

2179

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Victoria Bosch @initself.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Are brains and artificial neural networks converging onto universal representations? There is a seductive idea making the rounds in NeuroAI / machine learning: train systems well enough, and they all converge on the same representation of reality (i.e. a unique world model). We have thoughts™ 1/n

cell.com

The Umwelt Representation Hypothesis: rethinking Universality

Recent studies reveal striking representational alignment between artificial neural networks (ANNs) and biological brains, leading to proposals that all sufficiently capable systems converge on univer...

818175

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Mariya Toneva @mtoneva.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

This review began with the great Peter Hagoort asking after one of my talks: "What have we actually learned about the brain from brain–DNN comparisons?" 🔥 So eye-opening to survey NeuroAI work across vision and language--many questions have been answered in one field but remain open in the other!

0207

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Co-led with @leamariaschmitt.bsky.social l, Emin Çelik, and with @predictivebrain.bsky.social and @mtoneva.bsky.social 💫 We had so much fun discussing and writing this together — we love thinking about language and vision side by side :) Would love to hear your thoughts!

031

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

5/5 Looking ahead, we hope this synthesis helps shape the next decade of research through deeper cross-modal insights, brain data-driven improvements to DNNs, and model-driven neuroscience experimentation. Read the full Open Access review: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

cell.com

A decade of comparing brains to DNNs: Progress and perspectives

Over the past decade, comparisons between deep neural networks (DNNs) and the human brain have become central to cognitive neuroscience. Early work focused on vision, driven by the success of convolut...

140

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

4/5 As the field enters its second decade, we argue that combining constructive (building models) and deconstructive (interpreting models) approaches can move brain–DNN comparisons from descriptive alignment toward a theory-constraining scientific tool.

130

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

3/5 Therefore, we organize findings along three shared dimensions—representations, architectures, and objectives—highlighting where DNNs have validated long-standing neuroscientific hypotheses, where they've generated new ones, and where findings from vision and language converge or diverge.

110

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

2/5 Why bring vision and language together? Although both address closely related computational problems, research has largely evolved in parallel across the two domains. Bringing them together reveals shared computational principles—and where each domain is shaped by its own unique constraints.

110

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

1/5 Over a decade of comparing deep neural networks to the human brain—but what have we actually learned? Our new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Feature Review synthesizes a decade of brain–DNN comparisons, asking what they reveal about brain function across vision and language.

14421

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

I’ll be presenting at 9:30 AM PST in Oral Session D: Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics 2 at #ACL2026! Come say hi! 👋 And stay tuned for more of our work exploring language and language models in interactive worlds. 🚀

030

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

This work was co-led by @yifanluo.bsky.social , our former master's intern and now a stellar PhD student at KU Leuven 💫, together with our amazing team: Po-Ya Angela Wang, @asliozyurek.bsky.social , and Paula Rubio-Fernández 🥳

032

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Why do MLMs fall short? Our ablation studies point to gaps in spatial reasoning and perspective-taking. Can prompting close the gap? We tried two prompting strategies: they improve perspective-taking for possessives, but demonstrative errors persist.

000

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

We find that vocabulary words (e.g., *boat*, *cup*) are relatively easy for both. But perspectival words—possessives (*mine* vs. *yours*) and demonstratives (*this* vs. *that*)—are much, much harder 😱. MLMs show clear deficits on possessives and even larger ones on demonstratives.

000

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Dongyan Lin @dongyanl1n.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

(1/n) Thrilled to share my first paper at Meta FAIR! "EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data" 👶 Human infants learn language from sparse, noisy multimodal input. Today's VLMs can't. We built a benchmark + challenge to close that gap. 🧵

14016

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Excited to announce that I'll be starting my own lab in Tübingen this October! Hiring at all levels: Postdoc, PhD & RA. Want to work on computational cognitive science at scale? Apply: core-cognition.github.io Reposts and shares much appreciated 🙏

17717

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

We had a lot of fun building this truly interdisciplinary, cross-continent project, co-led with the amazing @yayun23.bsky.social and Paula Rubio-Fernández :).

010

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

What is the function of function words ⁉️Using head-mounted eye-tracking and machine learning, we show how tiny words like THIS and THAT actively power word learning 👶🤖. Check our preprint, we’d love to hear your feedback!!!

1154

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Good morning #ICLR2026 ☀️ The Re-Align workshop kicks off in under an hour! A full day on what we can actually do with representational alignment, from brains to language models to agents. Schedule in the thread 👇

1112

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Khai Loong Aw @khaiaw.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Children exhibit visual understanding from limited experience, orders of magnitude less than our best models. We introduce the Zero-shot World Model (ZWM). Trained on a single child's visual experience, BabyZWM rapidly generates competence across diverse benchmarks with no task-specific training. 🧵

15724

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Kamila Maria Jozwik @kamilajozwik.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

postdoc and PhD positions in visual cognitive computational neuroscience in my lab at the University of Cambridge kamilajozwik.com/join_lab.html

kamilajozwik.com

Kamila Jozwik - Join lab

12712

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

micha heilbron @mheilbron.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging Deadline March 20 Please RT 🙏 👇 mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language

25239

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Stefano Sarao Mannelli @stefsm.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

📢 We’re now accepting applications for the 2026 School on Analytical Connectionism dedicated this year to Language Acquisition. 📍 Gothenburg, Sweden 🗓️ August 17–28, 2026 ☠️ Apply by April 17! 🔗 analytical-connectionism.net/school/2026/ 👇 Meet the experts joining us this summer!

1208

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Jennifer Hu @jennhu.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 📕👇 Hope this is helpful for anyone who wants a super broad, beginner-friendly intro to the topic! Thanks @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social for this amazing initiative!

05422

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Get ready to submit your 8-pagers!

0114

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Missed the Re-Align hackathon at ICLR or CCN 2025 — or want more? 🙂 Re-Align is back at ICLR 2026 🚀 Beyond the paper track, we’re launching a persistent shared-task challenge + challenge paper track. Can’t wait to see your creative & critical takes on representational alignment 🔥🥳

0121

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Erin Grant @eringrant.me · 06/12/2025

Thrilled to start 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS @ualberta.bsky.social + Amii.ca Fellow! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural & artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (speaking coginterp.github.io/neurips2025 & organising @dataonbrainmind.bsky.social)

410928

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Big congrats Tyler :) 🎉🥳🎊

110

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Donders Institute @dondersinst.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

🌱 The Donders Research Stimulation Funds give early-career scientists the freedom to build something new from the bottom up like the #Neuro-#AI #Focus #Group. A new round of the Donders Research Stimulation Funds is open until December 1st. 👇 www.ru.nl/en/donders-i...

ru.nl

Donders’ Research Stimulation Funds: call for new collaborations and focus groups | Radboud University

At the Donders Institute, new ideas often begin at the crossroads of disciplines. Through its Research Stimulation Funds, the institute encourages researchers to explore collaborations.

003

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Lukas Muttenthaler @lukasmut.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

🥳 I am incredibly humbled and grateful to share that our work, "Aligning machine and human visual representations across abstraction levels," has been published today in @nature.com ⬇️

0215

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Victoria Bosch @initself.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language. tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬 1/n

714253

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Julian Jara-Ettinger @julianje.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

Our paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...

compdevlab.yale.edu

34714

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Mariya Toneva @mtoneva.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

So excited and honored to receive an ERC Starting Grant for the project BrainAlign!! BrainAlign will bring LLMs closer to human understanding by directly aligning them with the human brain. Stay tuned for our findings, and multiple postdoc and PhD openings in the coming years!

4515

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Erin Grant @eringrant.me · 19/08/2025

I’m recruiting committee members for the Technical Program Committee at #CCN2026. Please apply if you want to help make submission, review & selection of contributed work (Extended Abstracts & Proceedings) more useful for everyone! 🌐 Helps to have: programming/communications/editorial experience.

31914

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Shahab Bakhtiari @shahabbakht.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Nice write-up on the top-performing models of Algonauts 2025 competition by @humanscotti.bsky.social paulscotti.substack.com/p/insights-f... None of the teams trained the models from scratch, mainly relied on pre-trained foundation models, and ensembling seemed to be the key ingredient. 🧠🤖

paulscotti.substack.com

Insights from the Algonauts 2025 Winners

What did we learn from a contest to predict fMRI brain activity to movie viewing?

0123

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Iris Groen @irisgroen.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Somewhat exhausted but very happily and proudly looking back at #CCN2025 & ready to pass the torch to NEW Amsterdam for #CCN2026 🥳Please fill out the survey 👇 to give input to the organizing team led by @neurograce.bsky.social and @toddgureckis.bsky.social @NYU!

0383

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Join us now for a collaborative hackathon 🤗

060

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Erin Grant @eringrant.me · 13/08/2025

Our #CCN2025 GAC debate w/ @gretatuckute.bsky.social, Gemma Roig (www.cvai.cs.uni-frankfurt.de), Jacqueline Gottlieb (gottlieblab.com), Klaus Oberauer, @mschrimpf.bsky.social &‬ @brittawestner.bsky.social asks: 📊 What benchmarks are useful for cognitive science? 💭 2025.ccneuro.org/gac

Speakers and organizers of the GAC debate. Time and location of the GAC debate: 5 PM in Room C1.03.

15016

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Greta Tuckute @gretatuckute.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

37129

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

This year, we're organizing travel and caregiver awards to help make CCN 2025 more accessible for those who might otherwise find it difficult to attend. If this kind of support would make a difference for you—or someone you know—we’d love for you to apply or pass the word along 🙌

0188

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Limor Raviv 🐘🤗🦒🍄🦄 @limorraviv.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

Interested in the evolution of human language and in understanding the pressures that shape languages today? Come do a PhD with me! Fully funded PhD position available in my group @mpi-nl.bsky.social, application deadline June 2nd: www.mpi.nl/career-educa...

mpi.nl

Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution | Max Planck InstituteMax Planck Institute for psycholinguistics

03330

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

That’s a wrap for Re²-Align 🤖 🧠👤 at #ICLR2025 🦁🥳— thanks for being part of it! We’re probably just getting started… see you all at Re³-Align🌷😉

0272

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Siddharth Suresh @siddsuresh97.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

✨ Come join us at the Second edition of the Re-Align workshop @iclr_conf ! 🚀🧠 The workshop explores the fascinating question of how artificial and biological systems align in their representations of the world. #ReAlign #ICLR2025

3165

Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

What an incredible Doktorhut haha! Huge congratulations to our Dr. Lukas 🎓— excited to see what your next chapter holds! So happy for you 😍🤩🥳

110

Reposted by Dota Tianai Dong

Mariya Toneva @mtoneva.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

One week left to apply! We'll have so much exciting data for projects: for example, neuropixel data from humans while they listen to sentences courtesy of @shaileejain.bsky.social, Eddie Chang, and his group.

064