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Kathy Garcia

@gkathy.bsky.social
129 followers 204 following 14 posts

Computational Cognitive Science PhD at Johns Hopkins with Leyla Isik | BS @Stanford| | 🔗 garciakathy.github.io |

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Reposted by Kathy Garcia
Rhodri Cusack @rhodricusack.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
We're hiring! 2 postdocs + 3 PhD students to join InfantNeuroAI at Trinity College Dublin: awake infant fMRI & OPM-MEG, plus computational models of how infants learn. Aims: understand infant visual cognition, infant neuroimaging methods, more energy-efficient learning 🧵 www.cusacklab.org/vacancies
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Jane Li 🦖 @janeli.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
🦀New preprint! (w/ @najoung.bsky.social)🦞 Is grammaticality a major organizing principle of NLM representations? We show that many NLMs exhibit abstract rep. separation for grammaticality. We believe this work addresses debates about confounds in measuring model gram. knowledge. [1/10]
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Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Looking forward to #CCN2026 - check out the presentations from our lab!
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Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Heading to #vss2026? Check out the presentations from our lab @vssmtg.bsky.social
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Iris Groen @irisgroen.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15). werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
werkenbij.uva.nl
Vacancy — PhD Position in NeuroAI for Video Perception in the Human Brain
<p><span>Are you interested in using AI to unravel the mysteries of the brain? Do you want to perform cutting-edge NeuroAI research and leverage deep learning to understand human vision? Then check out the vacancy below and apply for a PhD position in this exciting research direction.</span></p>
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
Excited to share that I’m at #NeurIPS2025 this year! 🧠 I’ll be presenting my work at UniReps on Social Tokens where we explore how to inject socially relevant visual features into language models to improve social reasoning and alignment. If you’re around, come say hi Feel free to DM for a chat! ☕️
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Reposted by Kathy Garcia
JHU Cognitive Science @jhucogsci.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
The department of Cognitive Science @jhu.edu is seeking motivated students interested in joining our interdisciplinary PhD program! Applications due 1 Dec Our PhD students also run an application mentoring program for prospective students. Mentoring requests due November 15. tinyurl.com/2nrn4jf9
Call for applications to cognitive science PhD program with QR code to the link above
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Reposted by Kathy Garcia
Doby Rahnev @dobyrahnev.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.
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Hannah Small @hsmall.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
Excited to share new work with @hleemasson.bsky.social , Ericka Wodka, Stewart Mostofsky and @lisik.bsky.social! 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
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Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Check out this new preprint led by @gkathy.bsky.social showing how a new fine-tuning scheme using human similarity judgements can improve existing video models, making them more human-aligned on different social tasks! arxiv.org/abs/2510.01502
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Together this work shows how different types of human similarity judgments can be leveraged to improve video models. We also share our large-scale video similarity judgment dataset, and code for hybrid triplet/RSA behavior guided fine-tuning: github.com/garciakathy/...
github.com
GitHub - garciakathy/similarity-judgments-finetuning
Contribute to garciakathy/similarity-judgments-finetuning development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
In follow-up experiments we show this model generalizes better to novel social tasks, and avoids catastrophic forgetting by preserving baseline on action recognition tasks.
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
After fine-tuning, the video model explains both captures more shared variance with language models AND captures more unique variance in human judgments, indicating it learned both language-like semantics and additional visual social nuances.
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Hybrid fine-tuning substantially increases match to human judgment on held-out videos and surpasses the best language model baseline. The hybrid loss > triplet-only loss and > RSA-only loss.
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
We fine-tune a video transformer with a novel hybrid objective function = Triplet loss (local constraints) + RSA Loss (global Pearson-correlation over pairwise distances), which captures both local and global similarity structure. We use Low Rank Adaptation to reduce the number of trainable params.
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Despite the task being purely visual, caption embeddings from a language model predict human similarity better than any pretrained video model (e.g., mpnet-base-v2 > TimeSformer-base).
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
🚨New preprint w/ @lisik.bsky.social! Aligning Video Models with Human Social Judgments via Behavior-Guided Fine-Tuning We introduce a ~49k triplet social video dataset, uncover a modality gap (language > video), and close via novel behavior-guided fine-tuning. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2510.01502
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Christina Sartzetaki @sargechris.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
Excited to be presenting this paper at #ICLR2025 this week! Come to the poster if you want to know more about how human brains and DNNs process video 🧠🤖 📆 Sat 26 Apr, 10:00-12:30 - Poster session 5 (#64) 📄 openreview.net/pdf?id=LM4PY... 🌐 sergeantchris.github.io/hundred_mode...
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
🚀 Together, this work highlights a major gap in AI's ability to match human social vision, and underscores the importance of developing AI models in dynamic social contexts [6/6]
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
📹 While most model features (like architecture or training objective) did not affect performance, we saw a big advantage for video versus image models along the lateral stream. But no model tested could predict anterior lateral stream responses well. [5/6]
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
🔍 Unlike visual scene features and ventral stream responses, vision models struggled to match human action and social interaction ratings, and did a poor job of predicting brain responses along the recently proposed lateral stream, specialized for social perception. [4/6]
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
🧠 We benchmarked 350+ image, video, and language models against human behavioral and neural responses to dynamic, social videos. [3/6]
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
🎥 Real-world vision is dynamic, involving complex social interactions. Current AI models provide a good match to humans in static scene vision, but how do they fare with dynamic, social stimuli? 🤔 We set out to explore this! [2/6]
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Kathy Garcia @gkathy.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
📢 Excited to announce our paper at #ICLR2025: “Modeling dynamic social vision highlights gaps between deep learning and humans”! w/ @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social, Colin Conwell, Mick Bonner, @lisik.bsky.social ‬ ‪📆 Thur, Apr, 24: 3:00-5:30 - Poster session 2 (#64) ‬ ‪📄 bit.ly/4jISKES%E2%8... [1/6]
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Colton Casto @coltoncasto.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network** with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n 🧵
biorxiv.org
The cerebellar components of the human language network
The cerebellum's capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role remains debated. Here, we sy...
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Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
Congratulations to @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social and all the Glushko Prize winners on this amazing and well-deserved honor!
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