Computational neuroscientist bringing machine and neural learning closer together @OxNeuro @OxfordDPAG | #firstgen | @ERC_Research Grantee 🇵🇹🇪🇺🇬🇧🌳
Joined December 2013
- Tweets 2,862
- Following 1,093
- Followers 3,174
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120 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
4 Nov 2025
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/s41467-0…
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
May 11
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…
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
May 11
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
May 11
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…
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
May 11
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.
May 11
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…
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May 11
Our first endeavour in jointly explaining human brain-behaviour through gameplay! An impressive effort led by @csaba_botos and @sreejan_kumar with the help of a team of collaborators!
Parer:
arxiv.org/abs/2605.08019
May 11
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…
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
28 Nov 2025
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:
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
25 Nov 2025
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…
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
20 Nov 2025
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
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🚨 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
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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!
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
31 Oct 2025
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
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
19 Sep 2025
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
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
9 Sep 2025
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 🫶
9 Sep 2025
🚨🚨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/
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11 Jul 2025
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/s41467-0……
@OxfordDPAG
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
4 Jul 2025
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😀
4 Jul 2025
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…
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4 Jul 2025
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…
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
25 Jun 2025
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
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
16 Jun 2025
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/10.1101/…
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
6 Jun 2025
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.
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Rui Ponte Costa retweeted
27 May 2025
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/1F…
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