Computational neuroscientist bringing machine and neural learning closer together @OxNeuro @OxfordDPAG | #firstgen | @ERC_Research Grantee 🇵🇹🇪🇺🇬🇧🌳
Oxford, UK
Joined December 2013
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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/ 🦋🦋🦋
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… 🧵
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
Jeee 🐦⬛
I am very proud of our joint effort with @sreejan_kumar Kumar on the project "Reason to Play"
LRMs show human-like rule discovery, and their hidden states predict human brain activity during gameplay.
Interactive demo + paper:
botcs.github.io/reason-to-pl…
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
I'm excited to share my new work joint with @csaba_botos: how well do frontier LRMs like DeepSeek-V4 learn novel video games and predict brain signatures associated with game learning? We found that they achieve SOTA on both game performance and brain predictivity! Thread 1/7
Jeee 🐦⬛
I am very proud of our joint effort with @sreejan_kumar Kumar on the project "Reason to Play"
LRMs show human-like rule discovery, and their hidden states predict human brain activity during gameplay.
Interactive demo + paper:
botcs.github.io/reason-to-pl…
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
Super proud to have contributed to this amazing team effort, led by @sreejan_kumar and @csaba_botos!
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/post below.
Jeee 🐦⬛
I am very proud of our joint effort with @sreejan_kumar Kumar on the project "Reason to Play"
LRMs show human-like rule discovery, and their hidden states predict human brain activity during gameplay.
Interactive demo + paper:
botcs.github.io/reason-to-pl…
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
The hippocampus is not a library, it is a simulation engine.
HPC is known for storing maps of the environment but not so known for generating planned trajectories.
This paper proposes that recurrence in CA3 is crucial to produce those plans.
Here is my toy model and notes:
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
NEWS: Hippocampus helps us learn to navigate unknown environments
The study by a team of international researchers and @OxfordDPAG reveals how the hippocampus supports flexible learning when sensory information is uncertain or incomplete.
medsci.ox.ac.uk/news/hippoca…
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
The brain has many processing pathways that reliably form during development, but where do these pathways come from?
In our new #NeurIPS paper, we identify three biologically relevant inductive biases that encourage pathway formation in Mixture-of-Experts models of the brain 🧵
ALT A brain made up of many different regions alongside a mixture-of-experts model diagram made up of many different experts
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
🚨 Big news for the neuroscience community!
The Call for Abstracts, Travel Grants and Registrations for #FENS2026 is officially open! 🧠
👉 Register and submit your work today: loom.ly/usQR0ao
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
As Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) grows in number of submissions, we are looking for more reviewers and action editors. Please sign up!
Only one paper to review at a time and <= 6 per year, reviewers report greater satisfaction than reviewing for conferences!
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
Finally out in @NatureComms: “Hippocampus supports multi-task RL under partial observability.”
Big thanks to my co-first @dabalpedamonti, co-authors @CiocchiStephane @MalagonVina Martin Dimitrov, and grateful to supervisor Rui Ponte Costa @somnirons 🙏
tinyurl.com/HippocRL
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
Excited to announce that we'll get to present our work on modeling brain-like processing pathways at NeurIPS later this year!
Check out our paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2506.02813
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
Come join us! @FLAIR_Ox has a long history of hosting visiting students and we are now trialling a slightly more formal process for a six months internship early 2026. The successful students will become fully-fledged members of FLAIR working on cutting edge ML in a wonderfully supportive environment featuring some of the smartest and nicest people I have ever had the chance to work with 🫶
🚨🚨Introducing the FLAIR internship program!🚨🚨
We are looking for two talented students to join us for an internship working in FLAIR for 6 months (5th January to 4th July 2026)!
For details and eligibility criteria, please check: foersterlab.com/internship/
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
After a year of review, our paper is now out in @NatureComms !
I really think our model/theory offers one of the most promising frameworks yet for learning in neocortical circuits - perhaps not in its final form, but the core principle of ssl feels right.
Hoping experimentalists will test it, break it, and computationalists will refine it
#AllModelsAreWrongButSomeAreUseful - I think this one could be very useful😀
Pleased to say that our story of how a theory of self-supervised learning in cortical layers accounts for several experimental observations is now out 🎉
nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
Closing soon! Register by July 1st for UK Neural Computation 2025
neuralcomputation.uk/
ECR day: 9 July - careers, grants, starting a lab
Main meeting: 10-11 July - 13 speakers, 70+ posters, sandpit
Hosted by @imperialcollege
Sponsors @ARIA_research @TheCrick