Architecture Is All You Need: Diversity-Enabled Sweet Spots for Robust Humanoid Locomotion

Robust humanoid locomotion in unstructured environments requires architectures that balance fast low-level stabilization with slower perceptual decision-making. We show that a simple layered control architecture (LCA), a proprioceptive stabilizer running at high rate, coupled with a compact low-rate perceptual policy, enables substantially more robust performance than monolithic end-to-end designs, even when using minimal perception encoders. Through a two-stage training curriculum (blind stabilizer pretraining followed by perceptual fine-tuning), we demonstrate that layered policies consistently outperform one-stage alternatives in both simulation and hardware. On a Unitree G1 humanoid, our approach succeeds across stair and ledge tasks where one-stage perceptual policies fail. These results highlight that architectural separation of timescales, rather than network scale or complexity, is the key enabler for robust perception-conditioned locomotion.

A Quantitative Framework for Layered Multirate Control: Toward a Theory of Control Architecture

Complex engineered and natural control systems, such as those used in robotics, the power grid, human sensorimotor control, and the Internet, are characterized by needing to operate robustly and reliably across many spatiotemporal scales despite being implemented using highly constrained hardware and software. Remarkably, a universal design pattern centered around layered control architectures (LCAs) has emerged to address these challenges across vastly different domains. These LCAs are the central object of study of this article (see “Summary”).

Random noise promotes slow heterogeneous synaptic dynamics important for robust working memory computation

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) based on model neurons that communicate via continuous signals have been widely used to study how cortical neural circuits perform cognitive tasks. Training such networks to perform tasks that require information maintenance over a brief period (i.e., working memory tasks) remains a challenge. Inspired by the robust information maintenance observed in higher cortical areas such as the prefrontal cortex, despite substantial inherent noise, we investigated the effects of random noise on RNNs across different cognitive functions, including working memory. Our findings reveal that random noise not only speeds up training but also enhances the stability and performance of RNNs on working memory tasks. Importantly, this robust working memory performance induced by random noise during training is attributed to an increase in synaptic decay time constants of inhibitory units, resulting in slower decay of stimulus-specific activity critical for memory maintenance. Our study reveals the critical role of noise in shaping neural dynamics and cognitive functions, suggesting that inherent variability may be a fundamental feature driving the specialization of inhibitory neurons to support stable information processing in higher cortical regions.

Can only meat machines be conscious?

Computational functionalism claims that executing certain computations is sufficient for consciousness, regardless of the physical mechanisms implementing those computations. This view neglects a compelling alternative: that subcomputational biological mechanisms, which realize computational processes, are necessary for consciousness. By contrasting computational roles with their subcomputational biological realizers, I show that there is a systematic tension in our criteria for consciousness: prioritizing computational roles favors consciousness in AI, while prioritizing subcomputational biological realizers favors consciousness in simpler animals. Current theories of consciousness are 'meat-neutral', but if specific physical substrates are necessary, AI may never achieve consciousness. Understanding whether consciousness depends on computational roles, biological realizers, or both, is crucial for assessing the prospects of consciousness in AI and less complex animals.

🚨 We're very happy to introduce TRIBE v2: a foundation model of the human brain's responses to sight, sound, and language. Leveraging 1,000+ hours of fMRI across 720 subjects, it generalizes… | Stéphane d'Ascoli | 16 comments

🚨 We're very happy to introduce TRIBE v2: a foundation model of the human brain's responses to sight, sound, and language. Leveraging 1,000+ hours of fMRI across 720 subjects, it generalizes zero-shot to new stimuli, tasks and people, finetunes efficiently, and enables in-silico experiments. ❓How does it work? Stemming from our v1, which won the Algonauts 2025 challenge, TRIBE v2 combines video, audio, and language embeddings to predict brain activity for any brain, then adapts to each individual. Key results: 📊 High-quality predictions — TRIBE v2 predicts brain activity across cortical and subcortical regions, significantly better than standard linear models, with a log-linear scaling law and no plateau in sight. 🎯 Zero-shot generalization — Without retraining, the predictions of TRIBE v2 are more correlated with group-averaged brain responses than almost any individual fMRI scan! A short finetuning step vastly improves over linear models trained, from scratch, on each individual. 🧪 In-silico experiments — Can we do useful experiments with TRIBE v2? Yes: classic vision and language paradigms replicate in-silico. It zero-shot recovers the FFA, PPA, EBA, VWFA, Broca's lateralization, and syntactic responses in STG — all without training on these artificial tasks. 🔍 Interpretability & multimodality — ICA on the weights rediscovers known functional networks (auditory, language, motion, default mode, visual) from naturalistic data alone. Ablating modalities further maps how vision, audition, and language integrate, with the largest gains at the temporo-parietal-occipital junction. 🧠 This effort is a step toward a foundation model of the human brain. Much remains to be understood, but we hope this opens a path for neuroscience, AI, and medical research alike. All code, weights, and a live demo are open — find it useful or mistaken in some conditions? Let us know, new test cases can only help improving this effort. 📄 Paper: https://lnkd.in/e7cbunJp 💻 Code: https://lnkd.in/ebwBVuJp ▶️ Demo: https://lnkd.in/eEUVxP4S 🤗 Model: https://lnkd.in/e2T8nPJP Joint work with Jérémy RAPIN, Yohann Benchetrit, Teon Brooks, Katie Begany, Joséphine Raugel, Hubert Banville and Jean-Rémi King. 🙏 Special thanks to Elisa Cascardi, Diego Marcos, Dominic Giardini, AI at Meta, and the open-source and neuroscience communities (in particular Lune Bellec and Bertrand Thirion for the amazing Courtois NeuroMod and IBC datasets) | 16 comments on LinkedIn

Grounded world models in biological organisms and future embodied AI

Recent advances in generative and embodied AI have been driven by large-scale predictive learning over multimodal data. However, the resulting systems remain largely based on passive training regimes where linguistic regularities create the scaffold onto which information from other modalities is attached. Conversely, neuroscience and cognitive science suggest that biological intelligence is organized in the opposite way, where grounded world models acquired through interaction with the environment provide the semantic scaffold to which language is attached. Here, we illustrate five examples of neural circuits supporting grounded world modelling, which underlie navigation in physical and conceptual spaces, affordance-based perception and interaction with objects, active perception and exploratory learning, allostatic control and emotion, and the distinction between self- and world-generated outcomes. These examples highlight several features largely missing from current embodied AI, including the role of intrinsic dynamics as a foundation for learning, the centrality of action in aligning these dynamics with the external world, the prominence of autonomous experience and open-ended learning over passive assimilation of externally provided data, and the fact that early predictive and control mechanisms scaffold higher cognitive abilities such as reasoning, conceptual navigation, planning, imagination, understanding others' minds, and communication. Finally, we discuss whether and how principles derived from biological systems may inform future embodied AI, including training regimes based on social interaction to construct world models that are not only grounded but also socially shared and aligned with human norms and values.

Introducing TRIBE v2: AI Model Predicts Human Brain Responses | AI at Meta posted on the topic | LinkedIn

Today we're introducing TRIBE v2, a foundation model trained to predict how the human brain responds to almost any sight or sound. Building on our Algonauts 2025 award-winning architecture, TRIBE v2 draws on 500+ hours of fMRI recordings from 700+ people to create a digital twin of neural activity. It enables zero-shot predictions for new subjects, languages, and tasks, consistently outperforming standard modeling approaches. We’re releasing the model, codebase, paper, and an interactive demo to help researchers advance neuroscience, apply brain insights to build better AI, and use computational simulation to speed up breakthroughs in neurological disease diagnosis and treatment. Try the demo and learn more here: https://go.meta.me/tribe2 | 175 comments on LinkedIn

Embracing the suboptimal organization of the human brain

Human brain architecture is guiding brain-inspired artificial intelligence (AI) and has been treated as an optimal template, whose deviations could mark different psychiatric and neurological conditions. We argue this premise is wrong: under any single goal (e.g., minimal wiring cost or maximal communication efficiency), the human connectome is suboptimal. Instead, its organization reflects multi-objective trade-offs navigated over evolution and development under biological and environmental constraints. For psychopathology, atypical trajectories are not distances from an ideal brain but reweighted compromises in the same trade-off space. For neuro-AI, directly duplicating the brain’s connectivity risks copying its irrelevant compromises. Treating brains and models as products of multi-objective optimization and co-tuning relevant objectives offers a more powerful framework for interpreting clinical phenotypes and designing next-generation AI.

The neuron as a direct data-driven controller | PNAS

In the quest to model neuronal function amid gaps in physiological data, a promising strategy is to develop a normative theory that interprets neur...

Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds

Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose composition and origin are not like any of the available natural model species. In this Perspective, I introduce TAME-Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere-a framework for understanding and manipulating cognition in unconventional substrates. TAME formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency. TAME provides a natural way to think about animal sentience as an instance of collective intelligence of cell groups, arising from dynamics that manifest in similar ways in numerous other substrates. When applied to regenerating/developmental systems, TAME suggests a perspective on morphogenesis as an example of basal cognition. The deep symmetry between problem-solving in anatomical, physiological, transcriptional, and 3D (traditional behavioral) spaces drives specific hypotheses by which cognitive capacities can increase during evolution. An important medium exploited by evolution for joining active subunits into greater agents is developmental bioelectricity, implemented by pre-neural use of ion channels and gap junctions to scale up cell-level feedback loops into anatomical homeostasis. This architecture of multi-scale competency of biological systems has important implications for plasticity of bodies and minds, greatly potentiating evolvability. Considering classical and recent data from the perspectives of computational science, evolutionary biology, and basal cognition, reveals a rich research program with many implications for cognitive science, evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, and artificial intelligence.

Mixture-of-Recursions: Learning Dynamic Recursive Depths for Adaptive Token-Level Computation

Scaling language models unlocks impressive capabilities, but the accompanying computational and memory demands make both training and deployment expensive. Existing efficiency efforts typically target either parameter sharing or adaptive computation, leaving open the question of how to attain both simultaneously. We introduce Mixture-of-Recursions (MoR), a unified framework that combines the two axes of efficiency inside a single Recursive Transformer. MoR reuses a shared stack of layers across recursion steps to achieve parameter efficiency, while lightweight routers enable adaptive token-level thinking by dynamically assigning different recursion depths to individual tokens. This allows MoR to focus quadratic attention computation only among tokens still active at a given recursion depth, further improving memory access efficiency by selectively caching only their key-value pairs. Beyond these core mechanisms, we also propose a KV sharing variant that reuses KV pairs from the first recursion, specifically designed to further decrease memory footprint. Across model scales ranging from 135M to 1.7B parameters, MoR forms a new Pareto frontier: at equal training FLOPs and smaller model sizes, it significantly lowers validation perplexity and improves few-shot accuracy, while delivering higher throughput compared with vanilla and existing recursive baselines. These gains demonstrate that MoR is an effective path towards large-model quality without incurring large-model cost.

Harnessing Chaos: How the Brain Turns Randomness into Robust Memory | Columbia Engineering

AI systems reveal how random fluctuations in brain activity may help stabilize memories

Introducing TRIBE v2: A Predictive Foundation Model Trained to Understand How the Human Brain Processes Complex Stimuli

Understanding how the human brain processes the world around us is one of the greatest open challenges in neuroscience. Breakthroughs here could transform how we understand and treat neurological conditions affecting hundreds of millions of people — and improve AI systems by directly guiding their development from neuroscientific principles.

Reverse-Engineering the Wetware: Spiking Networks, TD Errors, and the End of Matrix Math

An engineer-friendly deep dive into how the human brain truly processes information, learns without backpropagation, and uses spiking neural networks, predictive coding, and dopamine-driven TD errors—challenging our notions of AI and matrix math.

🚀🚀🚀 Excited to share that our Brain&AI team is releasing NeuralSet! 🚀🚀🚀 A fast, simple, and scalable package for Neuro-AI: 📦 `pip install neuralset` 💻 Code: https://lnkd.in/eamwxBUY 📄… | Jarod Lévy | 12 comments

🚀🚀🚀 Excited to share that our Brain&AI team is releasing NeuralSet! 🚀🚀🚀 A fast, simple, and scalable package for Neuro-AI: 📦 `pip install neuralset` 💻 Code: https://lnkd.in/eamwxBUY 📄 Paper: https://lnkd.in/epbreyDy As a PhD student working extensively with neuro recordings and AI models, I find this library to be a game-changer. This has been the common backbone for the past several years of our projects (TribeV2, DynaDiff, Brain2Qwerty & more!). This library turns raw neuro-recordings into AI-ready tensors. It enables:  - Event-driven processing with typed, validated DataFrames. - Multimodal extractors for fMRI, EEG, MEG, EMG, and iEEG + text, image, audio, and video. - Torch-native segmentation for efficient batching. - Caching and remote compute through exca. Huge thanks to everyone on the team who made this release possible. If you're working on brain decoding, encoding models, or foundation models for neuroscience, don’t miss this! 🧠 Jean-Rémi King Hubert Banville Katie Begany Corentin Bel Yohann Benchetrit Teon Brooks Marlène Careil Simon Dahan Stéphane d'Ascoli Alexandre Défossez Linnea Evanson, PhD Pablo J. Diego Simón, Julien Gadonneix, Sophia Houhamdi Shubh Khanna Pierre Orhan Antoine Ratouchniak Joséphine Raugel Andrea Elena Santos Revilla Alexis Thual Lucy (Mingfang) Zhang Jérémy RAPIN | 12 comments on LinkedIn

Addressing the Precision-Breadth-Simplicity Impossible Trinity in Psychological Research: A Comprehensive Exploration Approach

Psychological research faces a fundamental challenge—the Precision-Breadth-Simplicity (PBS) impossible trinity. While experimental findings are often precise and simple, they tend to be narrow in scope. Conversely, broad-and-simple concepts frequently lack precision. Developing theories that are both precise and broad is scientifically valuable but inevitably introduces complexity, which conflicts with humans’ cognitive limitations in processing complexity. To address this impossible trinity, I propose a comprehensive exploration (CE) approach—a data-guided theory-building framework that involves: (1) designing experimental conditions in a stimulus-driven way, with minimal upfront theoretical specification; (2) conducting experiments with tens of millions of observations (e.g., 40 million responses in Huang, 2025a); (3) modeling the results through iterative improvements; and (4) producing the outcome: a moderately complex quantitative information-processing model to integrate diverse empirical findings. Inspired by similar strategies that drove breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (e.g., ImageNet’s role in advancing object recognition), the CE approach offers a promising path toward more integrative psychological theories. Initial implementations in visual working memory research demonstrate both its practicality and potential to transform how we study mental processes.