👀🧠(x) | x ∈ {👀🧠,🤖} PhD student @mpi_sws_ trying to trick rocks into thinking and remembering.

Saarbrücken, Germany
Joined August 2020
Mathis Pink retweeted
🚨 Two open postdoc positions in the ERC-funded project BrainAlign at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbruecken, Germany: position #1 on NeuroAI: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/5… position #2 on human-centered LLM evaluations: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/5… Application deadline: Oct 13, 2026
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The Umwelt Representation Hypothesis: Rethinking Universality Opinion by Victoria Bosch (@__init_self), Rowan Sommers, Adrien Doerig (@AdrienDoerig), & Tim Kietzmann (@TimKietzmann) tinyurl.com/y7rty324
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Mathis Pink retweeted
1/5 Over a decade of comparing deep neural networks to the human brain—but what have we actually learned? Our new @TrendsCognSci Feature Review synthesizes a decade of brain–DNN comparisons, asking what they reveal about brain function across vision and language.
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How can generative AI better support human creativity, without limiting it? If you have thoughts, we invite submissions to our ICML workshop on Generative AI, Creativity, and Human-AI Co-Creation (@creativeai_ws) 📍 July 2026, Seoul 📄 Submit by: April 24 (AOE) ⏬ (1/2)
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📢 I'm recruiting PhD students at MPI!! Topics include: 1⃣ LLM factuality, reliable info synthesis and reasoning, personalization + applications in real-world inc. education, science 2⃣ Data-centric interpretability 3⃣Creativity in AI, esp scientific applications 🧵1/2
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Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @lu_zejin @martisamuser and Radoslaw Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168
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Mathis Pink retweeted
🚨Excited to share our latest work published at Interspeech 2025: “Brain-tuned Speech Models Better Reflect Speech Processing Stages in the Brain”! 🧠🎧 arxiv.org/abs/2506.03832 W/ @mtoneva1 We fine-tuned speech models directly with brain fMRI data, making them more brain-like.🧵
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We will be presenting this 💫 spotlight 💫 paper at #ICLR2025. Come say hi or DM me if you're interested in discussing AI #interpretability in Singapore! 📆 Poster Session 4 (#530) 🕰️ Fri 25 Apr. 3:00-5:30 PM 📝 openreview.net/forum?id=Qogc… 📊 iclr.cc/virtual/2025/poster/…
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Excited to share our new preprint bit.ly/402EYEb with @mtoneva1, @ptoncompmemlab, and @manojneuro), in which we ask if GPT-3 (a large language model) can segment narratives into meaningful events similarly to humans. We use an unconventional approach: ⬇️
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Mathis Pink retweeted
A few interesting challenges in extending context windows. A model with a big prompt =/= "infinite context" in my mind. 10M tokens of context is not exactly on the path to infinite context. Instead, it requires a streaming model that has - an efficient state with fast incremental state updates - strong compression & abstraction of multimodal history - effective at reasoning over state to generate future action (The model needs to be able to run forever.) I dislike the phrase "infinite context" as a matter of taste, since it suggests an extension of the retrieval based paradigm where you reason over context windows in order to answer a query. That's not quite what's going on. Instead, memory is about building useful abstraction over histories. It's nice to think of it as a state with a choice of method for storing/updating information -- this is more in line with a model that always runs and streams in information. Transformers / SSMs are just different ways to choose how to model the state and update it. There are more abstractions left to uncover. There are also new data regimes and training algorithms required to produce these kind of long-term memory models. Interaction is a core part of the way these models operate. We don't seem to have the right evals that measure useful proxies that are in line with this notion of memory. Ideally, it's not just about being able to remember facts -- the model should get better at retaining skills (compound knowledge), and learning new skills over time (learning to learn faster). This is a very interesting direction that I'm personally super excited to be working on.
Sam Altman: 10m context window in months, infinite context within several years
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Anyway, glad to see that the whole "let's just pretrain a bigger LLM" paradigm is dead. Model size is stagnating or even decreasing, while researchers are now looking at the right problems -- either test-time training or neurosymbolic approaches like test-time search, program synthesis, and symbolic tool use.
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Consider the prompt X="Describe a beautiful house." We can consider two processes to generate the answer Y: (A) sample P(Y | X) or, (B) sample an image Z with a conditional image density model P(Z | X) and then sample P(Y | Z). 1/3
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Mathis Pink retweeted
4/n💡We find that fine-tuning or RAG do not support episodic memory capabilities well (yet). In-context presentation supports some episodic memory capabilities but at high costs and insufficient length-generalization, making it a bad candidate for episodic memory!
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Mathis Pink retweeted
We are so excited to share the first work that demonstrates consistent downstream improvements for language tasks after fine-tuning with brain data!! Improving semantic understanding in speech language models via brain-tuning arxiv.org/abs/2410.09230 W/ @dklakow, @mtoneva1
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👋I am on the academic job market, looking for tenure-track positions. I work on machine learning, decision making, and social aspects of AI. Let's get in touch if your institution is hiring! 💻stsirtsis.github.io 😀Shares are very much appreciated!
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Mathis Pink retweeted
Adrien Doerig@AdrienDoerig9 Jul 2024
1/13 Heavily updated preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2209.11737 We show that the contextual information encoded in Large Language Models (LLMs) is beneficial for modelling the complex visual information extracted by the brain from natural scenes. 🧵
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Mathis Pink retweeted
🚨 Open #NeuroAI position for a PhD student Jointly at MPI for Software Systems & UoT (hosted by me & @neurodidact) Focus: reveal key *mechanisms* of language in 🧠 by integrating ML & physiological theories Apply by Jan 31: email CV + statement of interest to both hosts
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Mathis Pink retweeted
🚨New round of recruiting! Join our growing team to bridge ML models with interpretable domain expertise. Learn more: neuroexplicit.org/ Apply by Jan 7
Now hiring: Six PhD students and one postdoc, for research on combining neural and symbolic/interpretable models of language, vision, and action and ML. Work with world-class advisors at @Saar_Uni, MPI Informatics, @mpi_sws_, @CISPA, @DFKI. Details: neuroexplicit.org/jobs/
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Mathis Pink retweeted
Why are policy gradient methods typically so sample inefficient? Whenever a trajectory contains a reward, they credit all actions leading to it. But not all actions mattered! What if we could only credit actions that did matter? Our NeurIPS spotlight paper does just that 🧵️
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It’s time for my first tweet print! Presented at CCN2023 w/ @martisamuser @konigpeter @TimKietzmann “Diagnosing Catastrophe: Large parts of accuracy loss in continual learning can be accounted for by readout misalignment” arxiv.org/abs/2310.05644 🧵1/12
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