Computational neuroscientist bringing machine and neural learning closer together @OxNeuro @OxfordDPAG | #firstgen | @ERC_Research Grantee 🇵🇹🇪🇺🇬🇧🌳
Oxford, UK
Joined December 2013
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Can we find shared neural spaces across subjects?
Yes! We introduce Multi-encoder-decoder-VAE (MED-VAE), a method for model-guided cross-subject shared spaces.
Fantastic work led by @pangeliki
#CCN2026 (selected for a talk) 🧵 1/6
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
Out now in Nature Communications
nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
"Prefrontal cortex and striatum dissociate modality and learning order in cross-modal sensorimotor learning"
with: @da_song0808
bioRxiv: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
(and at SfN, poster 451.06)
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
We @bold_lab_ai are hiring a large cohort of home and overseas students for Fall 2027 entry. If you’re excited about discovering the next paradigm of open-source AI and want to work on ambitious, exploratory, but scalable ML, please apply. More application details and exact timeline coming soon, in the meantime please register your interest here bold-lab.ai/opportunities/ 🦋🦋🦋
Adding a new subject is cheap: we freeze the shared space and train only a new subject encoder/decoder on their own images. With 20% of the new subject's data, we recover ~98% of the alignment reached with all of it, and 90% of the noise ceiling in self-reconstruction. 5/6
CCN 2026 paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.15989
Code: github.com/pangelu9/MEDVAE_N…
CCN talk: youtu.be/7csqgzhIXNY?si=1K79…
Together with @achterbrain
@ten_photos
6/6
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
[Hugging Face release] We’re releasing the dataset behind Reason to Play! I’m incredibly proud of our team for reaching this milestone.
@sreejan_kumar Austin Andrews @LHuntNeuro @summerfieldlab Josh Tenenbaum @somnirons @marcelomattar @momchiltomov
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
TL;DR: This is one of the most important and exciting opportunities in AI on the planet - please read on.
The British Open-ended Learning & Discovery Lab is creating the perfect place for paradigm breaking AI research in the name of open-source and open-science. We have agency, we funding, we have unprecedented amounts of compute*, but WE NEED YOU!
..and we have created the dream job for you: The BOLD Fellow. This job combines a fast-moving, high agency, collaborative environment with full academic freedom and a salary that pays the bills.
Apply by noon UK time on the 15th of September for this once in a lifetime opportunity to shape the history of our field and of our planet:
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecruit…
*by academic standards
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
Two major announcements for the #DigitalBrainProject:
🥇9 teams were selected in the first round
🚀we’re scaling the funding to $15M
More details below 👇:
digitalbrainproject.org
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
This recent paper posted by @MillerLabMIT got my attention.
It shows how abstraction could emerge in PFC. If you are in CS/AI, it's a fun one.
The paper is hard, but the main idea can be reduced to a low-d space, so I made a little animation.
Here is my toy model and notes:🧵
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
1/9
How does the prefrontal cortex learn to think abstractly?
A new Nature Neuroscience study (Wójcik et al., 2026) tracked macaque PFC during rule learning
nature.com/articles/s41593-0… 🧵
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/10.64898/2026.06.16.…
9/9 Note: This work brings together the best of the multiplexing ideas by @NeuroNaud @tyrell_turing w/ our interneurons-for-backprop work (Sacramento 2018) to achieve: scalable (multiplexing) and highly plausible (interneurons + many other features) deep cortical learning.
Work brilliantly led by @WillGreedy !
Code available here: github.com/neuralml/BurstCCN…
