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Sophia Becker

@sobeckerneuro.bsky.social
90 followers 107 following 6 posts

PhD student in computational neuroscience at EPFL, supervised by Wulfram Gerstner @gerstnerlab.bsky.social‬ | Working on computational models of intrinsic motivation, exploration and learning, with a special love for novelty✨

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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Alexander van Meegen @avm.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Interested in multitasking RNNs from a theory perspective? Check out this preprint with the amazing @lpezon.bsky.social. TLDR: A low-rank / latent space approach to @lndriscoll.bsky.social & @sussillodavid.bsky.social style shared components. And a story starring solution space degeneracy.
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Hugo Spiers @hugospiers.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Distinct roles of hippocampus and neocortex in symbolic compositional generalization Awesome work from: @summerfieldlab.bsky.social Lab www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Distinct roles of hippocampus and neocortex in symbolic compositional generalization
Humans can combine symbols to generate new meanings. Here, we studied the regional neural mechanisms that might make this possible. We asked participa…
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Alexander Mathis @trackingskills.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
www.linkedin.com/posts/alexan...
linkedin.com
We are seeking two postdoctoral fellows to join our team working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Our research is built around three intertwined questions: how to… | ...
We are seeking two postdoctoral fellows to join our team working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Our research is built around three intertwined questions: how to mea...
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Guillaume Bellec @bellecguill.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Accepted at ICML 2026. I am extremely proud of this work. Local learning is starting to work really well! The theoretical perspective of local learning minimizing an emergent global objective has been eye opening Congrats @zihan-wu.bsky.social and Ariane Delrocq! Great team
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Zihan Wu @zihan-wu.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Can we match self-supervised backpropagation using local learning rules? We show it is possible in our new paper accepted by ICML. We achieve: 1. theoretical equivalence to BP in a controlled setup 2. new SOTA for local learning across image datasets 3. same performance as BP on multiple datasets
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Laura Driscoll @lndriscoll.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
New job posting! If you're interested in working with our group, check it out. 3 year position (with possibility to extend) at >100k. alleninstitute.org/careers/jobs...
alleninstitute.org
Open Positions | Allen Institute
Build your career at the Allen Institute. Explore current job openings and find your place in a team driving some of the most ambitious open science in the world.
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Shervin Safavi @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
1/11 Happy to share our TICS paper on using the flexibility of one of the most basic cognitive functions, perception, to understand one of the most complex cognitive dysfunctions, psychiatric conditions (also my first formal work in computational psychiatry 🎉) 📄: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... 🧵 : 👇
cell.com
Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions
Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics a...
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
GerstnerLab @gerstnerlab.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Ever heard of the lottery ticket hypothesis? Our new paper shows that lottery tickets are not a useful metaphor to explain the success of overparameterized neural networks - and suggests an alternative metaphor: escape dimensions
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Flavio Martinelli @flavioh.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
NEW PAPER. Why do larger networks train better? "Because they contain more candidate *sub*networks that can learn the task" → lottery tickets This popular explanation uses an appealing but misleading metaphor🧵 We propose an intuitive alternative grounded in theory: escape dimensions
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Yue Kris Wu @kriswu.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Excited to share that our study on how cell-type-specific synaptic scaling mechanisms regulate memory representations in associative learning is now published! www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
jneurosci.org
Cell-type-specific synaptic scaling mechanisms differentially contribute to associative learning
Excitatory synaptic scaling regulates network dynamics by proportionally adjusting excitatory synaptic strengths after sensory perturbations. During associative learning, blocking excitatory scaling i...
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Sophia Becker @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Incredibly grateful to @cmiehl.bsky.social and @gjorjulijana.bsky.social for their thoughtful and spot-on Preview "Novelty beyond counting" of our recent work in Neuron with @modirshanechi.bsky.social and @gerstnerlab.bsky.social! 🧠✨ It's a real honor 🙏 www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Roxana Zeraati @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Some incredibly exciting news that still feels a bit surreal: I am starting my research group @mpicybernetics.bsky.social! The best part? We are hiring at all levels! Curious about the science we plan to tackle, read along :) #NeuroSky
An illustration of different species, from worms to humans, foraging, indicating the main topic of our research group.
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
EPFL Brain Mind Institute @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Novelty is not just about whats new, but also what feels new given past experience. New study from Sophia Becker in Wulfram Gerstner’s @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social lab posits a model showing how similarity between familiar and novel stimuli shapes exploration and learning - doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
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Sophia Becker @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
So excited to see this finally out!! 🤩🎉 A big thank you to our reviewers for their helpful feedback and to @modirshanechi.bsky.social and Wulfram Gerstner for the wonderful collaboration!
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
EPFL Brain Mind Institute @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
How does circuit structure shape neural activity? The lab of @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social Prof. Wulfram Gerstner shows that distinct neural circuits can produce similar low-dimensional dynamics, while retaining clear signatures in single neuron and population activity data: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Alireza Modirshanechi @modirshanechi.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
So happy to see this work out! 🥳 Huge thanks to our two amazing reviewers who pushed us to make the paper much stronger. A truly joyful collaboration with @lucasgruaz.bsky.social, @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social, and Johanni Brea! 🥰 Tweeprint on an earlier version: bsky.app/profile/modi... 🧠🧪👩‍🔬
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Reposted by Sophia Becker
Ben Eysenbach @ben-eysenbach.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
Excited to share new work led by @vivekmyers.bsky.social and @crji.bsky.social that proves you can learn to reach distant goals by solely training on nearby goals. The key idea is a new form of invariance. This invariance implies generalization w.r.t. the horizon.
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Sophia Becker @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
Stoked to be at RLDM! Curious how novelty and exploration are impacted by generalization across similar stimuli? Then don't miss my flash talk in the PIMBAA workshop (tmr at 10:30, E McNabb Theatre) or stop by my poster tmr (#74)! Looking forward to chat 🤩 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Representational similarity modulates neural and behavioral signatures of novelty
Novelty signals in the brain modulate learning and drive exploratory behaviors in humans and animals. While the perceived novelty of a stimulus is known to depend on previous experience, the effect of...
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