Rui Ponte Costa

How does the brain find its way in realistic environments? 🧠 Using deep RL and neural data, we show that hippocampal-like networks support navigation, learning, and generalisation in partially observable environments—mirroring real animal behaviour: nature.com/articles/s4146…

@NatureNeuro wrote a very nice research highlighted of our paper nature.com/articles/s4159…

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:

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/hippocamp…

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 🧵

🚨 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

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!

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

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

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 🫶

@LidaKanari @UniofOxford @UKRI_News Welcome!

I’m thrilled to be starting my research group at the University of Oxford, in the Department of Mathematics as an MRC, UKRI fellow! I’m grateful to everyone who has supported me along the way and helped make this dream a reality. @UniofOxford, @UKRI_News

Sharing this very cool drawing of our paper that @kevin_nejad generated using AI systems that have themselves been trained via self-supervision, which seems very fitting :) nature.com/articles/s4146…… @OxfordDPAG

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/s4146…

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

Our preprint is finally out! How can we understand the role of Behavioral Timescale Synaptic Plasticity in credit assignment? Does it fit into existing supervised and unsupervised learning frameworks? What theoretical gaps are still left unexplained? biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Our study on the impact of altered serotonin (5-HT) signalling on developing sensory cortex is now live @NatureComms We use longitudinal in vivo imaging of 5-HT & neural activity to show that this neuromodulator is buffered in early life to promote bottom-up instruction.

Hello World: My team at FAIR / @metaai (AI Research Agent) is looking to hire contractors across software engineering and ML. If you are interested and based in the UK, please fill in the following short EoI form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

We will be hosting a public kick-off for the data collection phase of the OpenScope Predictive processing community project. All are welcome to join! Tuesday, May 6, 2025 from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM (PST) 🧵

I'm looking for 2 Research Assistants for 1-year positions to investigate biophysical mechanisms of learning (finally the formal procedures are open for applications)