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Rui Ponte Costa

@somnirons.bsky.social
2K followers 339 following 83 posts

Computational neuroscientist bringing machine and neural learning closer together [Oxford NeuroAI] @ox.ac.uk @oxforddpag.bsky.social 🇵🇹🇪🇺🇬🇧🌳 neuralml.github.io www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/neuroai

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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Great summary of our paper with @mark-j-wagner.bsky.social
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Guillaume Bellec @bellecguill.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I have a postdoc position open in my NeuroAi lab in Vienna 👌👾🧪🧠 And I will be at Bernstein (workshop only), please reach out if you are interested
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Congrats Blake!
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Nico Schuck @nicoschuck.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
2023: 8,039 proposals 2024: 10,360 proposals 2025: 17,066 proposals 2026: 21,627 proposals Something's gotta give
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COSYNE @cosynemeeting.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
📢Have work to share with the computational and systems neuroscience community? Abstract submissions for #COSYNE2027 are now open. Deadline: 18 October 2026, 11:59 p.m. AoE Submit your abstract: www.cosyne.org/abstracts-su... #Neuroscience
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Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I’m on the faculty job market this fall! 🐦🧠 I’m an NIH K99/R00 awardee studying how the brain learns complex skills, using birdsong to connect molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior & computation. Know of a search where I might fit? Please send it my way & share!
drewschreiner.github.io
Drew Schreiner, Ph.D. | Neuroscience of Learning
I use birdsong to understand how the brain learns complex skills across molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior, and computation. On the 2026–27 faculty job market.
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Well done! Muitos parabens!!
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
If this makes you mad, submit your cognitive science research to @openmindjournal.bsky.social No APCs, no subscription fees. It's funded by university libraries, at low cost.
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Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
The cortex and cerebellum split the labor: the cortex provides a stable, general-purpose movement blueprint, while the cerebellum reorients that same blueprint differently for each context Granule cells reorient cortical trajectories to separate contexts www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience
nature.com
Granule cells reorient cortical trajectories to separate contexts - Nature
Simultaneous imaging of premotor cortex and cerebellar granule cells in mice learning two skills in parallel shows that trajectories generalize in cortex but coherently reorient apart in granule cells...
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The Royal Society @royalsociety.org · 29/08/2026
The Ferrier Medal and Lecture 2027 is awarded to Professor Kenneth Daniel Harris for his contributions to neuroscience by unifying experimental neurophysiology with advanced analytical methods and for pioneering methods that allow recording from thousands of neurons. #RSMedals bit.ly/4qCJZRo
A man in a black shirt smiles at the camera in front of a whiteboard covered in scientific notation.
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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Oh wow! @thetransmitter.bsky.social amplified recent Bsky chatter about the dire US grant landscape. Thank you, @emilysingerneuro.bsky.social 🙏.
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OxfordDPAG @oxforddpag.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/news/divisio...
dpag.ox.ac.uk
Division of labour: study in Nature shows how the brain continually adapts to novel situations
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
These results provides direct support for our theoretical ideas in Pemberton et al. 2024! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Cerebellar-driven cortical dynamics can enable task acquisition, switching and consolidation - Nature Communications
How the brain maintains a stable world model while swiftly adapting to environmental changes remains unclear. Here, the authors propose that the cerebellum drives cortical dynamics, enabling rapid tas...
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
How does the brain continually adapt? Fresh in @natureportfolio.nature.com our super exciting collaboration with @mark-j-wagner.bsky.social showing that the cerebellum contextualises cortical dynamics enable multi-task learning: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Granule cells reorient cortical trajectories to separate contexts - Nature
Simultaneous imaging of premotor cortex and cerebellar granule cells in mice learning two skills in parallel shows that trajectories generalize in cortex but coherently reorient apart in granule cells...
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Tim Kietzmann @timkietzmann.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
📢 We are hiring a full professor in "Intelligence in Biological and Artificial Systems". Come join us at Germany's first and largest cognitive science program. Please share far and wide, and get in touch with any questions. www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/universit...
uni-osnabrueck.de
129 FB 8 W3 Professorship Intelligence in Biological and Artificial Systems, Institute of Cognitive Science: Uni Osnabrück
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CogCompNeuro @cogcompneuro.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
This is a wrap for #CCN2026! We look forward to meet again in Edinburgh next year!
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
While I am sad to miss #CCN2026 our group will showing the cool stuff that we have been doing in the model-brain alignment space, including a selected talk by Angeliki! See list, including our fun gaming collaboration with the groups of @marcelomattar.bsky.social and @momchiltomov.bsky.social
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Yay, the field needs this! Excited to serve as an associate editor!
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Marcelo Mattar @marcelomattar.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Very excited to attend #CCN2026 this week and to present various projects from my lab! Here's a list of our posters and talks in case you'd like to see what we've been up to.
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Totally agree with this perspective. We need to consider how intelligence arises in the first place if we want to reproduce it — learning principles are critical.
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Really cool illustration of our paper. @neurosock.bsky.social's great work!
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
I would totally like to second this. Huge congrats to Michał Wójcik who has managed to get this over the line despite the huge challenges!
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Thanks Blake!
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Work brilliantly led by @will-greedy.bsky.social !
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Code available here: github.com/neuralml/Bur...
github.com
GitHub - neuralml/BurstCCN-journal: Cell-type-specific cortical feedback coordinates hierarchical credit assignment
Cell-type-specific cortical feedback coordinates hierarchical credit assignment - neuralml/BurstCCN-journal
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
9/9 note: This work brings together the best of the multiplexing ideas by @neuronaud.bsky.social @tyrellturing.bsky.social w/ our interneurons-for-backprop work (Sacramento 2018) to achieve: scalable (multiplexing) and highly plausible (interneurons + many other features) deep cortical learning.
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
8/9 Overall, our work shows how cell-type-specific cortical feedback enables AI-like hierarchical credit assignment, bridging synaptic plasticity, dendritic-circuit computations and behaviour. It opens many exciting avenues!
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
7/9 The theory makes a further prediction that interneurons should constrain the dimensionality (rank) of error-related feedback: frontal regions need more SST interneurons! Offering a functional rationale for cortex-wide gradients in interneuron density (Kim et al. 2017).
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
6/9 Importantly, it unifies: interneuron-specific modulation of synaptic plasticity (Williams and Holtmaat 2019), differential learning in interneurons (Chevy et al. bioRxiv), and the very recent findings of neuron-specific dendritic error signals in a BCI task (Francioni et al. 2026).
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
5/9 Next, by mapping these principles to a Dalean network it predicts interneuron-specific event decoding, with SST burst decoding at its heart.
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
4/9 As expected, our model also approximates well ANN performance in more complex tasks such as dynamic naturalistic tasks (without labels), CIFAR-10/Imagenet and deep reinforcement learning.
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
3/9 For exact EI balance our model (cian) gives a near-exact approximation of ANN backprop with relaxations requiring periods of exc-inh rebalancing (purple and blue), through inhibitory-like plasticity (in line w/ Froemke, Vogels, etc.).
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
2/9 We have previously shown that these principles enable single-phase deep learning (Greedy et al. 2022). Here we further show that our theory predicts the need for a tight balance between QY feedback pathways (exc-inh balance at distal dendrites).
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
1/9 We propose differential cortical feedback pathways: one for decoding any spiking events (blue) and another for burst spike events (orange). A new task will generate errors that cause changes in bursts events that are then “back propagate” across the cortex to drive synaptic plasticity.
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Our latest story is finally in preprint! 🧠✨ How does the brain solve the (hierarchical) credit assignment problem efficiently? Cell-type-specific cortical feedback holds the key, closely approximating backprop. Paper: doi.org/10.64898/202...
doi.org
Cell-type-specific cortical feedback coordinates hierarchical credit assignment
Learning is thought to arise from synaptic modifications embedded in brain-wide circuits, yet how such circuits coordinate plasticity to support complex behaviour is not known. Inspired by deep learni...
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Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Job klaxon 📣 UCL is hiring two NeuroAI / computational neuroscience specialists (Lecturer or Associate Prof) — a big part of the new NeuroAI centre we're growing in Biosciences. Do consider applying if it's relevant to you. JD & details: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRX021 Happy to take questions.
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Laurence Hunt @lhuntneuro.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
This has been a super-fun project. Can modern LLMs/LRMs learnto play simple video-games from scratch? Can we outperform existing models of these tasks when predicting fMRI data? In the words of @botoscsabi.bsky.social , "the short answer is yes and yes". If you want the long answer, see below :-)
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Marcelo Mattar @marcelomattar.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Super proud to have contributed to this amazing team effort, led by @sreejan.bsky.social and @botoscsabi.bsky.social! We asked: Which AI models learn to play video games like humans, comparing both behavior and internal representations. The answer surprised us! Check out our paper and post below
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Our first endeavour in jointly explaining human brain-behaviour through gameplay! An impressive effort led by @botoscsabi.bsky.social and @sreejan.bsky.social with the help of a team of collaborators! Parer: arxiv.org/abs/2605.08019
arxiv.org
Reason to Play: Behavioral and Brain Alignment Between Frontier LRMs and Human Game Learners
Humans rapidly learn abstract knowledge when encountering novel environments and flexibly deploy this knowledge to guide efficient and intelligent action. Can modern AI systems learn and plan in a sim...
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Everton J Agnes @ejagnes.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
New preprint with @sevberg.bsky.social! We map Hopfield-like binary networks onto spiking networks with dendrites … and it works! Same memory capacity, bigger basins of attraction, plus selective recall through dendritic gating, and more. How? Dendrites! See below.
doi.org
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
Hi @cogcompneuro.bsky.social the rebuttal button for the CCN papers seems to have gone for a few hours now, and the deadline is only in two hours. Can you please look into this?
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 14/03/2026
My travel to Cosyne was barred by the Trump admin, so I'm here on my personal dime. I care about the COSYNE community, I committed to co-chairing. And I always learn here. But the worst part about this travel ban is my lab colleagues— students and fellows—couldn't come. /1
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Dimitra Maoutsa @dimma.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
I am looking for a theory/computational POSTDOC position in EU or east coast US. I am interested in how learning and plasticity shape population dynamics & representational geometries & how these changes are reflected in behavior. If you are at #COSYNE2026 & interested, hit me up in Whova, not here
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COSYNE @cosynemeeting.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Follow us on instagram for live updates of what’s going on at COSYNE 2026 www.instagram.com/cosynemeetin...
instagram.com
Instagram
Create an account or log in to Instagram - Share what you're into with the people who get you.
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Caroline Nettekoven @carobellum.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
🧠 Resting-state fMRI is often treated as the gold standard for studying the brain’s intrinsic organization. But is it actually the best way to estimate functional architecture? We tested this directly. 🧵1/8
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Renato Duarte @rcfduarte.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.
open.substack.com
22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience
Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting
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Jascha Achterberg @achterbrain.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Going to Cosyne? There will be a "Biologically-inspired Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities" workshop on Monday 16th! 🧠 Exciting lineup of speakers alongside the opportunity to present your #NeuroAI poster, more info on program & poster signup below! #compneuro #neuroscience
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Nicolas Skatchkovsky @nskat.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
We're organising a #Cosyne workshop on biologically-inspired AI on Monday 16th with @achterbrain.bsky.social! 🧠 We've got an incredibly exciting array of speakers, and you have the possibility to sign up to present your poster on #NeuroAI! More info below ⬇️ #compneuro #neuroscience #neuroskyence
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Thank you Mark for involving us! Very exciting story!
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Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
The contextual machine of the brain? Beautiful data!
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