Publications

Evolutionarily conserved neural dynamics across mice, monkeys, and humans
Olivier Codol
Margaux Asclipe
Anton R Sobinov
Z. Jeffrey Chen
Junchol Park
Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos
Joshua T. Dudman
Juan Álvaro Gallego
Guillaume Lajoie
Matthew G. Perich
Zihao Chen
On evolutionary timescales, brain circuits adapt to support survival in each species' ecological niche. While some anatomical aspects of neu… (see more)ral circuitry are conserved across species with distant evolutionary origins, each species also exhibits specific circuit adaptations that enable its behavioral repertoire. It remains unclear whether homologous brain regions leverage analogous neural computations as different species perform common behaviors such as reaching and manipulating objects. Here, we directly assessed conservation of neural computations using intracortical recordings from mouse, monkey, and human motor cortex-a homologous region across many mammals-during motor behaviors crucial for survival. We hypothesized that, despite their phylogenetic distance, rodents and primates produce movements through conserved neural computations implemented by motor cortical population dynamics. Remarkably, we found that movement-related neural dynamics were highly conserved across species, while variations in behavioral output were uniquely captured in neural trajectory geometries. Strikingly, neural dynamics during movement across species were more conserved than those across brain regions in the same human and between motor preparation and execution in the same monkeys. Lastly, through manipulation of neural network models trained to perform reaching movements, we reinforce that conservation of neural dynamics across species likely stems from shared circuit constraints. We thus assert that evolution maintains neural computations across phylogeny even as behavioral repertoires expand.
2026-03-06
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
PIKAN: Physics-Inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Explainable UAV Channel Modelling
Kürşat Tekbıyık
Gunes Karabulut Kurt
Antoine Lesage-Landry
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications demand accurate yet interpretable air-to-ground (A2G) channel models that can adapt to non-stat… (see more)ionary propagation environments. While deterministic models offer interpretability and deep learning (DL) models provide accuracy, both approaches suffer from either rigidity or a lack of explainability. To bridge this gap, we propose the Physics-Inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (PIKAN) that embeds physical principles (e.g., free-space path loss, two-ray reflections) into the learning process. Unlike physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), PIKAN is more flexible for applying physical information because it introduces them as adaptable inductive biases. Thus, it enables a more flexible training process. Experiments on UAV A2G measurement data show that PIKAN achieves comparable accuracy to DL models while providing symbolic and explainable expressions aligned with propagation laws. Remarkably, PIKAN achieves this performance with only 232 parameters, making it up to 37 times lighter than multilayer perceptron (MLP) baselines with thousands of parameters, without sacrificing correlation with measurements and also providing symbolic expressions. These results highlight PIKAN as an efficient, interpretable, and scalable solution for UAV channel modelling in beyond-5G and 6G networks.
2026-03-06
IEEE Aerospace Conference (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
CNeuroMod-THINGS, a densely-sampled fMRI dataset for visual neuroscience
Marie St-Laurent
Basile Pinsard
Oliver Contier
Elizabeth DuPré
Katja Seeliger
Valentina Borghesani
Julie A. Boyle
Lune Bellec
Martin N. Hebart
Data-hungry neuro-AI modelling requires ever larger neuroimaging datasets. CNeuroMod-THINGS meets this need by capturing neural representati… (see more)ons for a wide set of semantic concepts using well-characterized images in a new densely-sampled, large-scale fMRI dataset. Importantly, CNeuroMod-THINGS exploits synergies between two existing projects: the THINGS initiative (THINGS) and the Courtois Project on Neural Modelling (CNeuroMod). THINGS has developed a common set of thoroughly annotated images broadly sampling natural and man-made objects which is used to acquire a growing collection of multimodal neural responses. Meanwhile, CNeuroMod is acquiring hundreds of hours of fMRI data from a core set of participants during controlled and naturalistic tasks, including visual tasks like movie watching and videogame playing. For CNeuroMod-THINGS, four CNeuroMod participants each completed 33-36 sessions of a continuous recognition paradigm using 4320 images from the THINGS stimulus set spanning 720 categories. We report behavioural and neuroimaging metrics that showcase the quality of the data. By bridging together large existing resources, CNeuroMod-THINGS expands our capacity to model human vision in controlled and naturalistic settings.
2026-03-05
Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
End-to-End Fine-Tuning of 3D Texture Generation using Differentiable Rewards
Amirhossein Zamani
Tianhao Xie
Amir G. Aghdam
Tiberiu Popa
Eugene Belilovsky
While recent 3D generative models can produce high-quality texture images, they often fail to capture human preferences or meet task-specifi… (see more)c requirements. Moreover, a core challenge in the 3D texture generation domain is that most existing approaches rely on repeated calls to 2D text-to-image generative models, which lack an inherent understanding of the 3D structure of the input 3D mesh object. To alleviate these issues, we propose an end-to-end differentiable, reinforcement-learning-free framework that embeds human feedback, expressed as differentiable reward functions, directly into the 3D texture synthesis pipeline. By back-propagating preference signals through both geometric and appearance modules of the proposed framework, our method generates textures that respect the 3D geometry structure and align with desired criteria. To demonstrate its versatility, we introduce three novel geometry-aware reward functions, which offer a more controllable and interpretable pathway for creating high-quality 3D content from natural language. By conducting qualitative, quantitative, and user-preference evaluations against state-of-the-art methods, we demonstrate that our proposed strategy consistently outperforms existing approaches. Our implementation code is publicly available at: https://github.com/AHHHZ975/Differentiable-Texture-Learning
2026-03-05
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
A Latent Space Thermodynamic Model of Cell Differentiation
Ali Poursina
Shayan Hajhashemi
Arsham Mikaeili Namini
Alihossein Saberi
Amin Emad
Hamed S. Najafabadi
Abstract Inferring the governing dynamics of differentiation that capture cell state evolution remains a central challenge in single-cell bi… (see more)ology. We present Latent Space Dynamics (LSD), a thermodynamics-inspired framework that models cell differentiation as evolution on a learned Waddington landscape in latent space. LSD jointly infers a low-dimensional cell state, a differentiable potential function governing developmental flow, and a local entropy term that quantifies cellular plasticity. Using a neural ordinary differential equation, LSD reconstructs continuous differentiation trajectories from time-ordered single-cell data. Across diverse developmental systems, LSD accurately recovers lineage hierarchies, predicts fate commitment for unseen cell types, and outperforms existing trajectory inference approaches in directional accuracy. Moreover, in silico gene perturbations reveal how individual regulators reshape the landscape, and entropy provides a quantitative measure of plasticity in development and cancer.
2026-03-05
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
Populus tremuloides as a natural fire barrier in Canada’s boreal forest under a changing climate
Flavie Pelletier
Jeffrey A. Cardille
Joanne C. White
Aspen ( Populus tremuloides ) stands have historically been considered a barrier to wildfire progression across Canada. However, as the clim… (see more)ate changes and negatively impacts fire weather conditions, the established relationship between aspen, weather, and wildfires may also be changing. We explored this relationship using annual maps of dominant tree species extent and wildfire occurrence for three recent active fire years (2021–2023) within four Canadian forested ecozones (275 Mha), where most interactions between aspen stands and wildfires take place. We compared the proportion of aspen at burned perimeters with the proportion of aspen within the burned perimeters and found that aspen was more than twice as common at fire perimeters (ratio of 2.42). Increasing aspen cover also decreased daily burned area, from a median of 717 ha/day to 646 ha/day when aspen cover increased from less than 10% to more than 25%. Our analysis indicated that the increase in daily burned area following a rise in the fire weather index was reduced when greater aspen cover was present. Additionally, comparison of burn severity in spruce- and pine-dominated stands showed that aspen burned at a significantly lower severity than spruce in the two ecozones where aspen presence is greater. Our results indicate that despite a warming climate and an increase in the number of days conducive to severe fires, aspen continues to function as a barrier to the progression of wildfire and mitigates increases in daily burn area under extreme weather conditions. • Aspen act as a fire barrier: it is twice as common at fire perimeters than inside. • Increasing aspen cover reduces daily burned area. • Greater aspen cover moderates increased burned area caused by extreme fire weather. • Aspen burn severity was lower than spruce and pine where aspen presence was greater. • The difference in fire activity between leaf and leafless aspen is mixed.
2026-03-05
Forest Ecology and Management (published)
doi.org
Preventing Learning Stagnation in PPO by Scaling to 1 Million Parallel Environments
Michael Beukman
Khimya Khetarpal
Zeyu Zheng
Will Dabney
Jakob Foerster
Michael Dennis
Clare Lyle
Plateaus, where an agent's performance stagnates at a suboptimal level, are a common problem in deep on-policy RL. Focusing on PPO due to it… (see more)s widespread adoption, we show that plateaus in certain regimes arise not because of known exploration, capacity, or optimization challenges, but because sample-based estimates of the loss eventually become poor proxies for the true objective over the course of training. As a recap, PPO switches between sampling rollouts from several parallel environments online using the current policy (which we call the outer loop) and performing repeated minibatch SGD steps against this offline dataset (the inner loop). In our work we consider only the outer loop, and conceptually model it as stochastic optimization. The step size is then controlled by the regularization strength towards the previous policy and the gradient noise by the number of samples collected between policy update steps. This model predicts that performance will plateau at a suboptimal level if the outer step size is too large relative to the noise. Recasting PPO in this light makes it clear that there are two ways to address this particular type of learning stagnation: either reduce the step size or increase the number of samples collected between updates. We first validate the predictions of our model and investigate how hyperparameter choices influence the step size and update noise, concluding that increasing the number of parallel environments is a simple and robust way to reduce both factors. Next, we propose a recipe for how to co-scale the other hyperparameters when increasing parallelization, and show that incorrectly doing so can lead to severe performance degradation. Finally, we vastly outperform prior baselines in a complex open-ended domain by scaling PPO to more than 1M parallel environments, thereby enabling monotonic performance improvement up to one trillion transitions.
2026-03-05
Open MIND (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Reinforcing the World's Edge: A Continual Learning Problem in the Multi-Agent-World Boundary
Dane Malenfant
Ordinary decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning presents each focal agent with a continual learning problem: peer updates change i… (see more)ts induced rewards and dynamics even when the joint Markov game is stationary. We connect the lifetime of success-conditioned reusable structure to peer learning and policy reuse. An invariant core represents maximal abstract patterns shared by a high fraction of successful trajectories; survival refers to a fixed pattern's coverage, not an unchanged maximal frontier. An established sharp conditioning bound limits coverage loss to
2026-03-05
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Emergent Reasoning via Recursive Latent Reinforcement Pretraining
Gopeshh Subbaraj
Istabrak Abbes
Artem Zholus
Matthew Riemer
Irina Rish
Sarath Chandar
Large language models (LLMs) often rely on explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) traces to solve multi-step reasoning problems, but these traces i… (see more)ncrease inference cost, expose brittle prompt dependence, and complicate training objectives. We study an alternative: \emph{latent deliberation} implemented as a small recurrent refinement module that performs multiple internal ``thinking`` steps while keeping the external sequence length fixed. We introduce \textbf{Recursive Latent Reinforcement Pretraining (RLRP)}, a training recipe that augments a base causal LLM with a shared latent head executed for
2026-03-04
LLM_Reasoning @ International Conference on Learning Representations (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Generative Recursive Reasoning Models
Junyeob BAEK
Mingyu Jo
Minsu Kim
Yoshua Bengio
Sungjin Ahn
We introduce Generative Recursive reAsoning Models (GRAM), a recursion-based generative model that is effective for complex planning and rea… (see more)soning problems. GRAM reformulates recent latent recursive architectures as a stochastic generative process with probabilistic latent transitions, enabling efficient and stable computation entirely in latent space without relying on token-level sequences as in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. We optimize this generative recursion via amortized variational inference, allowing the model to represent and explore multiple plausible latent trajectories conditioned on the input. This formulation supports both conditional reasoning through
2026-03-04
RSI @ International Conference on Learning Representations (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Low-loss diamagnetic levitation of dielectrics for sensing
Mahdi Hosseini
Mehrdad Sourki
Wisdom Boinde
2026-03-04
Quantum Sensing, Imaging, and Precision Metrology (published)
doi.org
LSD Relaxes Structural Constraints on Brain Dynamics and Default Mode Decoupling Tracks Ego Dissolution
Venkatesh Subramani
Annalisa Pascarella
Jérémy Brunel
Yann Harel
Suresh Muthukumaraswamy
Robin Carhart-Harris
Karim Jerbi
Giulia Lioi
Nicolas Farrugia
Abstract Psychedelics profoundly alter conscious experience, yet how they reshape the relationship between brain anatomy and function remain… (see more)s unclear. In particular, it is unknown whether psychedelic states reflect a global disruption of structure–function organization or a frequency– and network-specific reconfiguration of neural dynamics relative to the structural connectome. Here we address this question using source-localized magnetoencephalography mapped onto connectome harmonics to quantify structure–function coupling in humans under lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and placebo. LSD induces a robust decoupling of low-frequency (theta, alpha and beta) activity from anatomical constraints, indicating a global loosening of structure-aligned large-scale dynamics. In contrast, high-frequency gamma activity shows selective reorganization rather than uniform disruption. Greater gamma-band decoupling within core default-mode network regions predicts the intensity of ego dissolution across individuals, demonstrating that while LSD broadly alters large-scale dynamics, subjective loss of self is specifically linked to frequency-selective reorganization of the default-mode network. Functional decoding reveals that LSD does not produce indiscriminate disintegration but instead drives system-specific rebalancing, with preferential decoupling of visual and attentional systems and strengthened coupling within auditory networks. Together, these findings provide electrophysiological evidence that psychedelic states emerge from a frequency-dependent relaxation of structural constraints on brain activity and identify default-mode reorganization as a neural correlate of ego dissolution. These results offer a mechanistic framework for understanding how LSD may exert therapeutic effects by transiently relaxing rigid structural constraints and enhancing dynamical flexibility within networks involved in self-related processing.
2026-03-04
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org