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Aran Nayebi

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12 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Intrinsic Barriers and Practical Pathways for Human–AI Alignment: An Agreement-Based Complexity Analysis

Aran Nayebi

We formalize AI alignment as a multi-objective optimization problem called -agreement, in which a set of N agents (including humans) must reach approximate (ε) agreement across M candidate objectives, with probability at least 1-δ. Analyzing communication complexity, we prove an information-theoretic lower bound showing that once either M or N is large enough, no amount of computational power or rationality can avoid intrinsic alignment overheads. This establishes rigorous limits to alignment *itself*, not merely to particular methods, clarifying a "No-Free-Lunch" principle: encoding "all human values" is inherently intractable and must be managed through consensus-driven reduction or prioritization of objectives. Complementing this impossibility result, we construct explicit algorithms as achievability certificates for alignment under both unbounded and bounded rationality with noisy communication. Even in these best-case regimes, our bounded-agent and sampling analysis shows that with large task spaces (D) and finite samples, *reward hacking is globally inevitable*: rare high-loss states are systematically under-covered, implying scalable oversight must target safety-critical slices rather than uniform coverage. Together, these results identify fundamental complexity barriers---tasks (M), agents (N), and state-space size (D)---and offer principles for more scalable human-AI collaboration.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Intrinsic Goals for Autonomous Agents: Model-Based Exploration in Virtual Zebrafish Predicts Ethological Behavior and Whole-Brain Dynamics

Reece Keller
Alyn Kirsch
Felix Pei
Xaq Pitkow
Leo Kozachkov
Aran Nayebi

Autonomy is a hallmark of animal intelligence, enabling adaptive and intelligent behavior in complex environments without relying on external reward or task structure. Existing reinforcement learning approaches to exploration in reward-free environments, including a class of methods known as model-based intrinsic motivation, exhibit inconsistent exploration patterns and do not converge to an exploratory policy, thus failing to capture robust autonomous behaviors observed in animals. Moreover, systems neuroscience has largely overlooked the neural basis of autonomy, focusing instead on experimental paradigms where animals are motivated by external reward rather than engaging in ethological, naturalistic and task-independent behavior. To bridge these gaps, we introduce a novel model-based intrinsic drive explicitly designed after the principles of autonomous exploration in animals. Our method (3M-Progress) achieves animal-like exploration by tracking divergence between an online world model and a fixed prior learned from an ecological niche. To the best of our knowledge, we introduce the first autonomous embodied agent that predicts brain data entirely from self-supervised optimization of an intrinsic goal—without any behavioral or neural training data—demonstrating that 3M-Progress agents capture the explainable variance in behavioral patterns and whole-brain neural-glial dynamics recorded from autonomously behaving larval zebrafish, thereby providing the first goal-driven, population-level model of neural-glial computation. Our findings establish a computational framework connecting model-based intrinsic motivation to naturalistic behavior, providing a foundation for building artificial agents with animal-like autonomy.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Task-Optimized Convolutional Recurrent Networks Align with Tactile Processing in the Rodent Brain

Trinity Chung
Yuchen Shen
Nathan Kong
Aran Nayebi

Tactile sensing remains far less understood in neuroscience and less effective in artificial systems compared to more mature modalities such as vision and language. We bridge these gaps by introducing a novel Encoder-Attender-Decoder (EAD) framework to systematically explore the space of task-optimized temporal neural networks trained on realistic tactile input sequences from a customized rodent whisker-array simulator. We identify convolutional recurrent neural networks (ConvRNNs) as superior encoders to purely feedforward and state-space architectures for tactile categorization. Crucially, these ConvRNN-encoder-based EAD models achieve neural representations closely matching rodent somatosensory cortex, saturating the explainable neural variability and revealing a clear linear relationship between supervised categorization performance and neural alignment. Furthermore, contrastive self-supervised ConvRNN-encoder-based EADs, trained with tactile-specific augmentations, match supervised neural fits, serving as an ethologically-relevant, label-free proxy. For neuroscience, our findings highlight nonlinear recurrent processing as important for general-purpose tactile representations in somatosensory cortex, providing the first quantitative characterization of the underlying inductive biases in this system. For embodied AI, our results emphasize the importance of recurrent EAD architectures to handle realistic tactile inputs, along with tailored self-supervised learning methods for achieving robust tactile perception with the same type of sensors animals use to sense in unstructured environments.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Neural Foundations of Mental Simulation: Future Prediction of Latent Representations on Dynamic Scenes

Aran Nayebi
Rishi Rajalingham
Mehrdad Jazayeri
Guangyu Robert Yang

Humans and animals have a rich and flexible understanding of the physical world, which enables them to infer the underlying dynamical trajectories of objects and events, plausible future states, and use that to plan and anticipate the consequences of actions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these computations are unclear. We combine a goal-driven modeling approach with dense neurophysiological data and high-throughput human behavioral readouts that contain thousands of comparisons to directly impinge on this question. Specifically, we construct and evaluate several classes of sensory-cognitive networks to predict the future state of rich, ethologically-relevant environments, ranging from self-supervised end-to-end models with pixel-wise or object-slot objectives, to models that future predict in the latent space of purely static image-pretrained or dynamic video-pretrained foundation models. We find that ``scale is \emph{not} all you need'', and that many state-of-the-art machine learning models fail to perform well on our neural and behavioral benchmarks for future prediction. In fact, only one class of models matches these data well overall. We find that neural responses are currently best predicted by models trained to predict the future state of their environment in the \emph{latent} space of pretrained foundation models optimized for \emph{dynamic} scenes in a self-supervised manner. These models also approach the neurons' ability to predict the environmental state variables that are visually hidden from view, despite not being explicitly trained to do so. Finally, we find that not all foundation model latents are equal. Notably, models that future predict in the latent space of video foundation models that are optimized to support a \emph{diverse} range of egocentric sensorimotor tasks, reasonably match \emph{both} human behavioral error patterns and neural dynamics across all environmental scenarios that we were able to test. Overall, these findings suggest that the neural mechanisms and behaviors of primate mental simulation have strong inductive biases associated with them, and are thus far most consistent with being optimized to future predict on \emph{reusable} visual representations that are useful for Embodied AI more generally.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Explaining heterogeneity in medial entorhinal cortex with task-driven neural networks

Aran Nayebi
Alexander Attinger
Malcolm Campbell
Kiah Hardcastle
Isabel Low
Caitlin S Mallory
Gabriel Mel
Ben Sorscher

Medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) supports a wide range of navigational and memory related behaviors. Well-known experimental results have revealed specialized cell types in MEC --- e. g. grid, border, and head-direction cells --- whose highly stereotypical response profiles are suggestive of the role they might play in supporting MEC functionality. However, the majority of MEC neurons do not exhibit stereotypical firing patterns. How should the response profiles of these more "heterogeneous" cells be described, and how do they contribute to behavior? In this work, we took a computational approach to addressing these questions. We first performed a statistical analysis that shows that heterogeneous MEC cells are just as reliable in their response patterns as the more stereotypical cell types, suggesting that they have a coherent functional role. Next, we evaluated a spectrum of candidate models in terms of their ability to describe the response profiles of both stereotypical and heterogeneous MEC cells. We found that recently developed task-optimized neural network models are substantially better than traditional grid cell-centric models at matching most MEC neuronal response profiles --- including those of grid cells themselves --- despite not being explicitly trained for this purpose. Specific choices of network architecture (such as gated nonlinearities and an explicit intermediate place cell representation) have an important effect on the ability of the model to generalize to novel scenarios, with the best of these models closely approaching the noise ceiling of the data itself. We then performed in silico experiments on this model to address questions involving the relative functional relevance of various cell types, finding that heterogeneous cells are likely to be just as involved in downstream functional outcomes (such as path integration) as grid and border cells. Finally, inspired by recent data showing that, going beyond their spatial response selectivity, MEC cells are also responsive to non-spatial rewards, we introduce a new MEC model that performs reward-modulated path integration. We find that this unified model matches neural recordings across all variable-reward conditions. Taken together, our results point toward a conceptually principled goal-driven modeling approach for moving future experimental and computational efforts beyond overly-simplistic single-cell stereotypes.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Identifying Learning Rules From Neural Network Observables

Aran Nayebi
Sanjana Srivastava
Surya Ganguli
Daniel L. Yamins

The brain modifies its synaptic strengths during learning in order to better adapt to its environment. However, the underlying plasticity rules that govern learning are unknown. Many proposals have been suggested, including Hebbian mechanisms, explicit error backpropagation, and a variety of alternatives. It is an open question as to what specific experimental measurements would need to be made to determine whether any given learning rule is operative in a real biological system. In this work, we take a "virtual experimental" approach to this problem. Simulating idealized neuroscience experiments with artificial neural networks, we generate a large-scale dataset of learning trajectories of aggregate statistics measured in a variety of neural network architectures, loss functions, learning rule hyperparameters, and parameter initializations. We then take a discriminative approach, training linear and simple non-linear classifiers to identify learning rules from features based on these observables. We show that different classes of learning rules can be separated solely on the basis of aggregate statistics of the weights, activations, or instantaneous layer-wise activity changes, and that these results generalize to limited access to the trajectory and held-out architectures and learning curricula. We identify the statistics of each observable that are most relevant for rule identification, finding that statistics from network activities across training are more robust to unit undersampling and measurement noise than those obtained from the synaptic strengths. Our results suggest that activation patterns, available from electrophysiological recordings of post-synaptic activities on the order of several hundred units, frequently measured at wider intervals over the course of learning, may provide a good basis on which to identify learning rules.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Learning Physical Graph Representations from Visual Scenes

Daniel Bear
Chaofei Fan
Damian Mrowca
Yunzhu Li
Seth Alter
Aran Nayebi
Jeremy Schwartz
Li F. Fei-Fei

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have proved exceptional at learning representations for visual object categorization. However, CNNs do not explicitly encode objects, parts, and their physical properties, which has limited CNNs' success on tasks that require structured understanding of visual scenes. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the idea of ``Physical Scene Graphs'' (PSGs), which represent scenes as hierarchical graphs, with nodes in the hierarchy corresponding intuitively to object parts at different scales, and edges to physical connections between parts. Bound to each node is a vector of latent attributes that intuitively represent object properties such as surface shape and texture. We also describe PSGNet, a network architecture that learns to extract PSGs by reconstructing scenes through a PSG-structured bottleneck. PSGNet augments standard CNNs by including: recurrent feedback connections to combine low and high-level image information; graph pooling and vectorization operations that convert spatially-uniform feature maps into object-centric graph structures; and perceptual grouping principles to encourage the identification of meaningful scene elements. We show that PSGNet outperforms alternative self-supervised scene representation algorithms at scene segmentation tasks, especially on complex real-world images, and generalizes well to unseen object types and scene arrangements. PSGNet is also able learn from physical motion, enhancing scene estimates even for static images. We present a series of ablation studies illustrating the importance of each component of the PSGNet architecture, analyses showing that learned latent attributes capture intuitive scene properties, and illustrate the use of PSGs for compositional scene inference.

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Two Routes to Scalable Credit Assignment without Weight Symmetry

Daniel Kunin
Aran Nayebi
Javier Sagastuy-Breña
Surya Ganguli
Jonathan M. Bloom
Daniel L. K. Yamins

The neural plausibility of backpropagation has long been disputed, primarily for its use of non-local weight transport — the biologically dubious requirement that one neuron instantaneously measure the synaptic weights of another. Until recently, attempts to create local learning rules that avoid weight transport have typically failed in the large-scale learning scenarios where backpropagation shines, e. g. ImageNet categorization with deep convolutional networks. Here, we investigate a recently proposed local learning rule that yields competitive performance with backpropagation and find that it is highly sensitive to metaparameter choices, requiring laborious tuning that does not transfer across network architecture. Our analysis indicates the underlying mathematical reason for this instability, allowing us to identify a more robust local learning rule that better transfers without metaparameter tuning. Nonetheless, we find a performance and stability gap between this local rule and backpropagation that widens with increasing model depth. We then investigate several non-local learning rules that relax the need for instantaneous weight transport into a more biologically-plausible "weight estimation" process, showing that these rules match state-of-the-art performance on deep networks and operate effectively in the presence of noisy updates. Taken together, our results suggest two routes towards the discovery of neural implementations for credit assignment without weight symmetry: further improvement of local rules so that they perform consistently across architectures and the identification of biological implementations for non-local learning mechanisms.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Brain-Like Object Recognition with High-Performing Shallow Recurrent ANNs

Jonas Kubilius
Martin Schrimpf
Kohitij Kar
Rishi Rajalingham
Ha Hong
Najib Majaj
Elias Issa
Pouya Bashivan

Deep convolutional artificial neural networks (ANNs) are the leading class of candidate models of the mechanisms of visual processing in the primate ventral stream. While initially inspired by brain anatomy, over the past years, these ANNs have evolved from a simple eight-layer architecture in AlexNet to extremely deep and branching architectures, demonstrating increasingly better object categorization performance, yet bringing into question how brain-like they still are. In particular, typical deep models from the machine learning community are often hard to map onto the brain's anatomy due to their vast number of layers and missing biologically-important connections, such as recurrence. Here we demonstrate that better anatomical alignment to the brain and high performance on machine learning as well as neuroscience measures do not have to be in contradiction. We developed CORnet-S, a shallow ANN with four anatomically mapped areas and recurrent connectivity, guided by Brain-Score, a new large-scale composite of neural and behavioral benchmarks for quantifying the functional fidelity of models of the primate ventral visual stream. Despite being significantly shallower than most models, CORnet-S is the top model on Brain-Score and outperforms similarly compact models on ImageNet. Moreover, our extensive analyses of CORnet-S circuitry variants reveal that recurrence is the main predictive factor of both Brain-Score and ImageNet top-1 performance. Finally, we report that the temporal evolution of the CORnet-S "IT" neural population resembles the actual monkey IT population dynamics. Taken together, these results establish CORnet-S, a compact, recurrent ANN, as the current best model of the primate ventral visual stream.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

From deep learning to mechanistic understanding in neuroscience: the structure of retinal prediction

Hidenori Tanaka
Aran Nayebi
Niru Maheswaranathan
Lane McIntosh
Stephen Baccus
Surya Ganguli

Recently, deep feedforward neural networks have achieved considerable success in modeling biological sensory processing, in terms of reproducing the input-output map of sensory neurons. However, such models raise profound questions about the very nature of explanation in neuroscience. Are we simply replacing one complex system (a biological circuit) with another (a deep network), without understanding either? Moreover, beyond neural representations, are the deep network's computational mechanisms for generating neural responses the same as those in the brain? Without a systematic approach to extracting and understanding computational mechanisms from deep neural network models, it can be difficult both to assess the degree of utility of deep learning approaches in neuroscience, and to extract experimentally testable hypotheses from deep networks. We develop such a systematic approach by combining dimensionality reduction and modern attribution methods for determining the relative importance of interneurons for specific visual computations. We apply this approach to deep network models of the retina, revealing a conceptual understanding of how the retina acts as a predictive feature extractor that signals deviations from expectations for diverse spatiotemporal stimuli. For each stimulus, our extracted computational mechanisms are consistent with prior scientific literature, and in one case yields a new mechanistic hypothesis. Thus overall, this work not only yields insights into the computational mechanisms underlying the striking predictive capabilities of the retina, but also places the framework of deep networks as neuroscientific models on firmer theoretical foundations, by providing a new roadmap to go beyond comparing neural representations to extracting and understand computational mechanisms.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Task-Driven Convolutional Recurrent Models of the Visual System

Aran Nayebi
Daniel Bear
Jonas Kubilius
Kohitij Kar
Surya Ganguli
David Sussillo
James DiCarlo
Daniel Yamins

Feed-forward convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are currently state-of-the-art for object classification tasks such as ImageNet. Further, they are quantitatively accurate models of temporally-averaged responses of neurons in the primate brain's visual system. However, biological visual systems have two ubiquitous architectural features not shared with typical CNNs: local recurrence within cortical areas, and long-range feedback from downstream areas to upstream areas. Here we explored the role of recurrence in improving classification performance. We found that standard forms of recurrence (vanilla RNNs and LSTMs) do not perform well within deep CNNs on the ImageNet task. In contrast, novel cells that incorporated two structural features, bypassing and gating, were able to boost task accuracy substantially. We extended these design principles in an automated search over thousands of model architectures, which identified novel local recurrent cells and long-range feedback connections useful for object recognition. Moreover, these task-optimized ConvRNNs matched the dynamics of neural activity in the primate visual system better than feedforward networks, suggesting a role for the brain's recurrent connections in performing difficult visual behaviors.

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NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Deep Learning Models of the Retinal Response to Natural Scenes

Lane McIntosh
Niru Maheswaranathan
Aran Nayebi
Surya Ganguli
Stephen Baccus

A central challenge in sensory neuroscience is to understand neural computations and circuit mechanisms that underlie the encoding of ethologically relevant, natural stimuli. In multilayered neural circuits, nonlinear processes such as synaptic transmission and spiking dynamics present a significant obstacle to the creation of accurate computational models of responses to natural stimuli. Here we demonstrate that deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) capture retinal responses to natural scenes nearly to within the variability of a cell's response, and are markedly more accurate than linear-nonlinear (LN) models and Generalized Linear Models (GLMs). Moreover, we find two additional surprising properties of CNNs: they are less susceptible to overfitting than their LN counterparts when trained on small amounts of data, and generalize better when tested on stimuli drawn from a different distribution (e. g. between natural scenes and white noise). An examination of the learned CNNs reveals several properties. First, a richer set of feature maps is necessary for predicting the responses to natural scenes compared to white noise. Second, temporally precise responses to slowly varying inputs originate from feedforward inhibition, similar to known retinal mechanisms. Third, the injection of latent noise sources in intermediate layers enables our model to capture the sub-Poisson spiking variability observed in retinal ganglion cells. Fourth, augmenting our CNNs with recurrent lateral connections enables them to capture contrast adaptation as an emergent property of accurately describing retinal responses to natural scenes. These methods can be readily generalized to other sensory modalities and stimulus ensembles. Overall, this work demonstrates that CNNs not only accurately capture sensory circuit responses to natural scenes, but also can yield information about the circuit's internal structure and function.

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