Arnav Raha

📣 Excited to announce the 2nd edition of our workshop
“Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Theory, Autonomy, Embodiment & Environment”
at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #CoSyNe2026!!
🧠🤖🌍🪰🐟🐭💪🧘🏃

🗓️ March 17, 2026
📍 Cascais, Portugal
🔗 Speaker lineup and schedule: neuro-agent-models.github.io

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Before moving here I was always under the impression that “Upstate New York” was explicitly meant to contrast with “New York (City)” ergo everything north of the Bronx is Upstate—is that not the case 😅

High frequencies in horse whinnies are whistles The domesticated horse, Equus caballus, is a familiar and beloved species to humans around the world. Despite living closely with humans for over 4000 years, horse vocal communication is poorly under...

High frequencies in horse whinnies are whistles 🐎
One of the most common vocalizations, the whinny, has two independent frequency components: low and high. This unusual phenomenon is termed "biphonation".
The origin of the high frequency component has remained mysterious until now.
Find out more: ⤵️

The French word ‘aujourd’hui’ (today) consists of ‘au’ (on the), ‘jour’ (day), ‘de’ (of) and ‘hui’ (today). It was formed during the late Middle Ages.

However, many Romance words come from even older combinations. Some are hardly identifiable as such anymore.

Click my new graphics to explore them:

Reconstructing voice identity from noninvasive auditory cortex recordings A low-dimensional voice latent space derived from deep learning captures speaker-identity representations in the temporal voice areas and supports reconstruction of voices preserving identity information.

Thrilled: my PhD work “Reconstructing voice identity from noninvasive auditory cortex recordings” is now in @elife.bsky.social DNNs model human temporal voice areas & can reconstruct speaker identity from fMRI. Ty to supervisors, co authors, CERIMED & participants elifesciences.org/articles/98047

Parrots and humans share a brain mechanism for speech Brain activity in vocalizing budgerigar parrots showed a pattern that harkened to those found in the brains of people.

When it comes to speech, parrots have the gift of gab. And the way the brains of small parrots known as budgerigars bestow this gift is remarkably similar to human speech, researchers report.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parrots-humans-brain-speech-birds

Kea slipping down a metal roof, lower leg raised and corresponding wing out for balance.

Steezy backslide grind

Complex Social Vocalizations are Integrated into the Bat Wingbeat Cycle during Flight Acoustic communication plays a central role in animal social behavior and exhibits remarkable complexity in various taxa. In bats, the emission of echolocation calls is tightly coupled to wingbeat and respiratory rhythms. However, little is known about how complex social vocalizations are coordinated with the mechanics for powered flight. We investigated how complex social calls are integrated into flight of wild Nathusius' pipistrelles (Pipistrellus nathusii). Using synchronized audio and video recordings, we quantified wingbeat rhythms during free flight and incorporated these data into a kinematic inference model to reconstruct the timing of social calls relative to the wingbeat. We found that echolocation call emission is coupled to the upstroke phase of the wingbeat. Moreover, social calls span three wingbeat cycles during flight and are embedded within a continuous sequence of echolocation calls. While motif durations scale with syllable number, motif onsets are phase-locked to narrow, preferential phases of the wingbeat cycle. Our findings provide evidence that complex social calls in bats are integrated into the wingbeat during flight, demonstrating that vocal-locomotor coupling extends beyond echolocation to shape the structure of social communication. By mitigating the high energetic costs of vocalizing, biomechanical integration might have facilitated the evolution of complex vocal communication in bats.

Complex Social Vocalizations are Integrated into the Bat Wingbeat Cycle during Flight bioRxivpreprint

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.

@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

1/14

Drawing of two birds fighting

More sparrow sketches. These ones will be use in a mobile app about sparrows behaviour. More coming soon! #sciart #birds

Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats Abstract. In many group-living birds and mammals, the formation of affiliative relationships is hypothesized to cause vocal convergence (an increase in cal

Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats url: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Learning Abstractions for Hierarchical Planning in Program-Synthesis Agents Humans learn abstractions and use them to plan efficiently to quickly generalize across tasks -- an ability that remains challenging for state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) agents and deep rei...

A new and improved version of TheoryCoder, which learns to play video games in a human-like way by synthesizing both high-level abstractions and a low-level model of game mechanics:
arxiv.org/abs/2602.00929

As someone who pronounces "gif" with a hard "g", I hate when people justify it using the pronunciation of "graphics" because (a) the components of an acronym don't define its pronunciation & (b) the obvious analog is just the word "gift" (also girl, give, gill, etc.)

A prefrontal cortex map based on single-neuron activity - Nature Neuroscience The authors mapped spontaneous and choice activity across mouse prefrontal cortex. The activity maps aligned with intrinsic connectivity rather than anatomical subregions, suggesting that connectivity, not cytoarchitecture, organizes prefrontal function.

A study in Nature Neuroscience maps spontaneous and choice activity across mouse prefrontal cortex. The activity maps aligned with intrinsic connectivity rather than anatomical subregions, suggesting that connectivity, not cytoarchitecture, organizes prefrontal function. #Neuroskyence 🧪

I feel like I missing out on a lot of camaraderie with strangers by not being afraid of/disgusted by insects, spiders, rats, snakes, etc.

Map of Punjab showing 5 rivers

Wikipedia page of etymology for Punjab (“The Land of Five Waters”)

Map of Ossiriand showing 7 rivers

Wiki screenshot of Ossiriand etymology (“Land of the Seven Rivers”)

Was Ossiriand inspired by Punjab

them: whatchu thinking about
me, internally: *sacabambaspis*

Artificial agents can help us understand social recognition Emerging multi-agent artificial intelligence may help accelerate our understanding of this fundamental computation.

How does a brain know “who is who”? In our latest Postdoc Perspectives, Eunji Kong argues that emerging multi-agent artificial intelligence may help accelerate our understanding of how the brain computes social recognition and behavior.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/large-langua...

Congrats @danielavallentin.bsky.social happy to see this out in @currentbiology.bsky.social

A Network of Biologically Inspired Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs) Learns Hierarchical Features Without Error Backpropagation We introduce a biologically inspired, multilayer neural architecture composed of Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs). Each ReSU projects a recent window of its input history onto a canonical direction ob...

Move over ReLU 🚀
Meet **ReSU** (Rectified Spectral Unit): a biologically inspired, self-supervised unit for learning from dynamical data. A backprop-free multilayer ReSU network learns predictive features and recapitulates *Drosophila* vision.
To appear at AAAI: arxiv.org/abs/2512.23146

A colour ink drawing of a ratfish, brown with white spots.

A spotted ratfish! These are such neat weird little guys; I didn't realize they lived in our region (west coast Canada)
Drawn with fine line pen and alcohol markers
#fish #marine #pacificocean #ratfish #ghostshark #inkart #ohuhu

Sketch showing a pair of undetermined microraptorine dinosaurs perched on a branch with some snow falling down

I want to wish everyone Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays with this quick sketch of two Microraptorine dinosaurs in the snow ❄️. I hope everybody is having a great day and enjoying the presents! 🎁 🎄 🎅

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Real-Time Segmentation and Classification of Birdsong Syllables for Learning Experiments https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.19.695629v1

My first PhD paper is published! 🎉 We compared how wild bonobo and chimpanzee infants (0-5.5y) become independent from their mothers. Here is the open-access link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

🧵(1/5)

Cross-species consensus atlas of the primate basal ganglia https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.15.694496v1

Line sketch of a dragonfly with a note on wing outline, showing correct versus incorrect shape

A quick tip on insect wings
#sciart #art #insects