Julian Rossbroich
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jrbch.bsky.social
Julian Rossbroich
@jrbch.bsky.social
PhD in computational neuroscience @fmiscience.bsky.social.
Enthusiastic rock climber and cat dad.
Pinned
I've spent much of my PhD thinking about E/I balance, and our latest preprint represents the culmination of that journey. Huge thanks to @fzenke.bsky.social for guiding me.

Looking forward to your thoughts & comments.
1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance?
Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
led by @jrbch.bsky.social
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
Spiking neural networks people, this message is for you!

The annual SNUFA workshop is now open for abstract submission (deadline Sept 26) and (free) registration. This year's speakers include Elisabetta Chicca, Jason Eshraghian, Tomoki Fukai, Chengcheng Huang, and... you?

snufa.net/2025/

🤖🧠🧪
SNUFA 2025
Spiking Neural networks as Universal Function Approximators
snufa.net
August 7, 2025 at 11:56 AM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
What makes visual processing in the brain so powerful and flexible? Very excited to share our new work where we started from SOTA models that accurately predict dynamic brain activity during hours of video watching, and investigated core computations underlying visual perception
July 30, 2025 at 3:42 PM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
There might be a bit of misconception here. What the paper very convincingly shows is that visual cortex does not compute global oddball prediction errors and does not receive any top-down predictions that could be used to compute such prediction errors.
July 14, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A flexible hippocampal population code for experience relative to reward - Nature Neuroscience
Sosa et al. find that hippocampal neural activity in mice encodes both environmental location and experience relative to rewards, spanning distances far from reward, through parallel and flexible popu...
www.nature.com
June 12, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
We just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Memory by a thousand rules: Automated discovery of functional multi-type plasticity rules reveals variety & degeneracy at the heart of learning
Synaptic plasticity is the basis of learning and memory, but the link between synaptic changes and neural function remains elusive. Here, we used automated search algorithms to obtain thousands of str...
www.biorxiv.org
June 2, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
Forelimb movement control at the basal ganglia - brainstem interface!

Happy to finally share this work from me and @harsh-kanodia.bsky.social with Silvia Arber!

@biozentrum.unibas.ch @fmiscience.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Dynamic basal ganglia output signals license and suppress forelimb movements - Nature
Basal ganglia output neurons fire dynamically in bidirectional and movement-specific patterns to license forelimb movements. 
www.nature.com
May 28, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)
May 27, 2025 at 6:40 PM
I've spent much of my PhD thinking about E/I balance, and our latest preprint represents the culmination of that journey. Huge thanks to @fzenke.bsky.social for guiding me.

Looking forward to your thoughts & comments.
1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance?
Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
led by @jrbch.bsky.social
May 27, 2025 at 8:37 AM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
New preprint with my postdoc, Navid Shervani-Tabar, and former postdoc, Marzieh Alireza Mirhoseini.

Oja’s plasticity rule overcomes challenges of training neural networks under biological constraints.

arxiv.org/abs/2408.08408
Oja's plasticity rule overcomes several challenges of training neural networks under biological constraints
Deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance through carefully engineered training strategies. Nonetheless, such methods lack parallels in biological neural circuits, relying heavily on n...
arxiv.org
May 19, 2025 at 3:33 PM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
Top-down feedback is ubiquitous in the brain and computationally distinct, but rarely modeled in deep neural networks. What happens when a DNN has biologically-inspired top-down feedback? 🧠📈

Our new paper explores this: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
Top-down feedback matters: Functional impact of brainlike connectivity motifs on audiovisual integration
elifesciences.org
April 15, 2025 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
How does our brain predict the future? Our review of predictive processing + research program is now on arXiv arxiv.org/abs/2504.09614
50+ neuroscientists distributed across the world worked together to create this unique community project.
April 15, 2025 at 6:58 AM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
Check out our latest paper today in Nature: “Goal specific hippocampal inhibition gates learning” www.nature.com/articles/s41...
By Nuri Jeong, Xiao Zheng, Abby Paulson, Steph Prince and colleagues.
April 9, 2025 at 6:28 PM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
1/7: Super excited to share our new paper! This one should be of interest to neuroscientists and deep learning theory folks. This paper was a collaboration with Alexandre Payeur, @averyryoo.bsky.social, Thomas Jiralerspong, @mattperich.bsky.social, Luca Mazzucato, @glajoie.bsky.social
March 25, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by Julian Rossbroich
I'm excited to share that the last chapter of my PhD thesis is now published in Nature! 🍾

What drives serotonin neurons? We think it's the expectation of future reward and --- critically --- how fast this expectation is increasing. 📈

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

1/6
A prospective code for value in the serotonin system - Nature
Merging ideas from reinforcement learning theory with recent insights into the filtering properties of the dorsal raphe nucleus, a unifying perspective is found explaining why serotonin neurons are ac...
doi.org
March 27, 2025 at 9:04 PM