Uri Hasson
@urihasson.bsky.social
Neuro and AI researcher at @cimec_unitrento IT. Previously: NSF Program Director, ERC grantee, UChicago, Princeton, HUJI. Note 👉 there's a homonym 👬 at Princeton (my Alma Mater). Follow the right profile! Pubs: http://tinyurl.com/yckcw2v8
Reposted by Uri Hasson
The results challenge the texture-bias hypothesis of Geirhos et al. (2019).
This is one of those cases where a deep, careful review can add real value.
arxiv.org/abs/2509.20234
🧠🤖 #MLSky
This is one of those cases where a deep, careful review can add real value.
arxiv.org/abs/2509.20234
🧠🤖 #MLSky
ImageNet-trained CNNs are not biased towards texture: Revisiting feature reliance through controlled suppression
The hypothesis that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are inherently texture-biased has shaped much of the discourse on feature use in deep learning. We revisit this hypothesis by examining limitat...
arxiv.org
October 6, 2025 at 4:23 PM
The results challenge the texture-bias hypothesis of Geirhos et al. (2019).
This is one of those cases where a deep, careful review can add real value.
arxiv.org/abs/2509.20234
🧠🤖 #MLSky
This is one of those cases where a deep, careful review can add real value.
arxiv.org/abs/2509.20234
🧠🤖 #MLSky
@annabavaresco.bsky.social and
@tlmnhut.bsky.social show: supervised pruning of a DNN’s feature space better aligns with human category representations, selects distinct subspaces for different categories, and more accurately predicts people’s preferences for GenAI images.
doi.org/10.1145/3768...
@tlmnhut.bsky.social show: supervised pruning of a DNN’s feature space better aligns with human category representations, selects distinct subspaces for different categories, and more accurately predicts people’s preferences for GenAI images.
doi.org/10.1145/3768...
Modeling Human Concepts with Subspaces in Deep Vision Models | ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
Improving the modeling of human representations of everyday semantic categories, such
as animals or food, can lead to better alignment between AI systems and humans. Humans
are thought to represent su...
doi.org
September 22, 2025 at 7:28 PM
@annabavaresco.bsky.social and
@tlmnhut.bsky.social show: supervised pruning of a DNN’s feature space better aligns with human category representations, selects distinct subspaces for different categories, and more accurately predicts people’s preferences for GenAI images.
doi.org/10.1145/3768...
@tlmnhut.bsky.social show: supervised pruning of a DNN’s feature space better aligns with human category representations, selects distinct subspaces for different categories, and more accurately predicts people’s preferences for GenAI images.
doi.org/10.1145/3768...
Reposted by Uri Hasson
New preprint out together with @mheilbron.bsky.social
We find that a stimulus' representational magnitude—the L2 norm of its DNN representation—predicts intrinsic memorability not just for images, but for words too.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
We find that a stimulus' representational magnitude—the L2 norm of its DNN representation—predicts intrinsic memorability not just for images, but for words too.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Representational magnitude as a geometric signature of image and word memorability
What makes some stimuli more memorable than others? While memory varies across individuals, research shows that some items are intrinsically more memorable, a property quantifiable as “memorability”. ...
www.biorxiv.org
September 18, 2025 at 9:53 AM
New preprint out together with @mheilbron.bsky.social
We find that a stimulus' representational magnitude—the L2 norm of its DNN representation—predicts intrinsic memorability not just for images, but for words too.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
We find that a stimulus' representational magnitude—the L2 norm of its DNN representation—predicts intrinsic memorability not just for images, but for words too.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
New lab preprint, led by @tlmnhut.bsky.social. We show that certain topographic CNNs offer computational advantages, including greater weight matrix robustness, better handling of OOD noisy data, and higher entropy of unit activation.
arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043
arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043
Improved Robustness and Functional Localization in Topographic CNNs Through Weight Similarity
Topographic neural networks are computational models that can simulate the spatial and functional organization of the brain. Topographic constraints in neural networks can be implemented in multiple w...
arxiv.org
August 7, 2025 at 8:21 PM
New lab preprint, led by @tlmnhut.bsky.social. We show that certain topographic CNNs offer computational advantages, including greater weight matrix robustness, better handling of OOD noisy data, and higher entropy of unit activation.
arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043
arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043
Reposted by Uri Hasson
Nhut Truong, Uri Hasson: Improved Robustness and Functional Localization in Topographic CNNs Through Weight Similarity https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00043 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.00043
August 4, 2025 at 6:32 AM
Nhut Truong, Uri Hasson: Improved Robustness and Functional Localization in Topographic CNNs Through Weight Similarity https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00043 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.00043
Does it seem like Spam is just mocking us at this point?
"I hope your day is as positive as you are.
We are very fortunate to associate with eminent people like you.... If you dont want to receive our email, reply as Terminate."
"I hope your day is as positive as you are.
We are very fortunate to associate with eminent people like you.... If you dont want to receive our email, reply as Terminate."
July 17, 2025 at 8:04 AM
Does it seem like Spam is just mocking us at this point?
"I hope your day is as positive as you are.
We are very fortunate to associate with eminent people like you.... If you dont want to receive our email, reply as Terminate."
"I hope your day is as positive as you are.
We are very fortunate to associate with eminent people like you.... If you dont want to receive our email, reply as Terminate."
Reposted by Uri Hasson
#Calcium_imaging in sleeping #bees: Antennal lobe neurons synchronise stronger during #sleep, likely due to reduced GABAergic coupling. #SNN simulations show reduced #odour processing, similar to human sleep: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
Thanks to all collaborators at #CIMeC, e.g. @urihasson.bsky.social
Thanks to all collaborators at #CIMeC, e.g. @urihasson.bsky.social
May 14, 2025 at 12:30 PM
#Calcium_imaging in sleeping #bees: Antennal lobe neurons synchronise stronger during #sleep, likely due to reduced GABAergic coupling. #SNN simulations show reduced #odour processing, similar to human sleep: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
Thanks to all collaborators at #CIMeC, e.g. @urihasson.bsky.social
Thanks to all collaborators at #CIMeC, e.g. @urihasson.bsky.social
Reposted by Uri Hasson
Explore vision, motor control & predictive processing with a funded PhD @cimecunitrento.bsky.social
Project: Predictive neural representations of dynamic events, supervisor Moritz Wurm @moritzwurm.bsky.social
🧠 Apply by June 5, 2025
🔗 Info: phd.unitn.it/drcimec
#neuroscience #cognitivescience
Project: Predictive neural representations of dynamic events, supervisor Moritz Wurm @moritzwurm.bsky.social
🧠 Apply by June 5, 2025
🔗 Info: phd.unitn.it/drcimec
#neuroscience #cognitivescience
May 12, 2025 at 6:54 AM
Explore vision, motor control & predictive processing with a funded PhD @cimecunitrento.bsky.social
Project: Predictive neural representations of dynamic events, supervisor Moritz Wurm @moritzwurm.bsky.social
🧠 Apply by June 5, 2025
🔗 Info: phd.unitn.it/drcimec
#neuroscience #cognitivescience
Project: Predictive neural representations of dynamic events, supervisor Moritz Wurm @moritzwurm.bsky.social
🧠 Apply by June 5, 2025
🔗 Info: phd.unitn.it/drcimec
#neuroscience #cognitivescience
Now online: We used two-photon calcium imaging to provide the first demonstration of how topological signatures of bees’ brain connectivity differ between sleep and wakefulness. Project guided by Albrecht Haase; first author: Sebastián Moguilner.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Neuronal correlates of sleep in honey bees
Honey bees Apis mellifera follow the day-night cycle for their foraging activity, entering rest periods during darkness. Despite considerable research…
www.sciencedirect.com
May 11, 2025 at 9:54 AM
Now online: We used two-photon calcium imaging to provide the first demonstration of how topological signatures of bees’ brain connectivity differ between sleep and wakefulness. Project guided by Albrecht Haase; first author: Sebastián Moguilner.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
PhD opening. We've been working in recent years on human-oriented and explainable AI, studying interpretable DNN models of conceptual knowledge. Looking for a PhD student (4 years, Trento, Italy) to develop that direction. If interested, get in touch by email: my first name at my last name dot org
April 9, 2025 at 7:45 AM
PhD opening. We've been working in recent years on human-oriented and explainable AI, studying interpretable DNN models of conceptual knowledge. Looking for a PhD student (4 years, Trento, Italy) to develop that direction. If interested, get in touch by email: my first name at my last name dot org
DNNs can predict human similarity judgments—but why? In a new #XAI study, we introduce Alignment Importance Scores (AIS), a method that improves AI-human alignment and generates heatmaps highlighting the image features that drive this alignment. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Explaining Human Comparisons Using Alignment-Importance Heatmaps - Computational Brain & Behavior
We present a computational explainability approach for human comparison tasks, using Alignment Importance Score (AIS) heatmaps derived from deep-vision models. The AIS reflects a feature map’s unique ...
link.springer.com
March 11, 2025 at 5:28 PM
DNNs can predict human similarity judgments—but why? In a new #XAI study, we introduce Alignment Importance Scores (AIS), a method that improves AI-human alignment and generates heatmaps highlighting the image features that drive this alignment. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Reposted by Uri Hasson
Just received notice that our grant was terminated. 5R24AG066599-03
TheRiseRegistry.org
TheRiseRegistry.org
March 1, 2025 at 1:36 AM
Just received notice that our grant was terminated. 5R24AG066599-03
TheRiseRegistry.org
TheRiseRegistry.org
ICCV has an interesting policy that can be easily adopted by other societies.
February 28, 2025 at 7:28 PM
ICCV has an interesting policy that can be easily adopted by other societies.
Reposted by Uri Hasson
Department of Transportation orders all personnel to "identify and eliminate" every order, directive, rule, regulation, policy, notice, guidance document, funding arrangement, or program that even mentions climate change, diversity, or environmental justice
www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.go...
www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.go...
January 31, 2025 at 1:40 PM
Department of Transportation orders all personnel to "identify and eliminate" every order, directive, rule, regulation, policy, notice, guidance document, funding arrangement, or program that even mentions climate change, diversity, or environmental justice
www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.go...
www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.go...
As a former NSF program director, I find it difficult to put into words the extent to which the content and tone of this memo go against the grain of anything and everything that defines merit-based review at NSF.
January 28, 2025 at 7:31 AM
As a former NSF program director, I find it difficult to put into words the extent to which the content and tone of this memo go against the grain of anything and everything that defines merit-based review at NSF.
Interesting analyses from Hanson et al., the strain on scientific publishing. Many more articles, more special issues (namely Frontiers, MDPI), but stagnation in number of PHDs granted. "in 2022 the article total was ∼47% higher than in 2016".
direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
January 9, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Interesting analyses from Hanson et al., the strain on scientific publishing. Many more articles, more special issues (namely Frontiers, MDPI), but stagnation in number of PHDs granted. "in 2022 the article total was ∼47% higher than in 2016".
direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
New paper with Giuseppe Notaro presenting a method for quantitative measurement of sighting eye dominance link.springer.com/article/10.3...
Quantifying sighting dominance using on-display projections of monocular and binocular views - Behavior Research Methods
Sighting dominance is an important behavioral property which has been difficult to measure quantitatively with high precision. We developed a measurement method that is grounded in a two-camera model ...
link.springer.com
January 9, 2025 at 6:57 AM
New paper with Giuseppe Notaro presenting a method for quantitative measurement of sighting eye dominance link.springer.com/article/10.3...
Reposted by Uri Hasson
The neurobiology of language does not operate in a vat. An important perspective from the @thelablab.bsky.social and colleagues: "Language is widely distributed throughout the brain" www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Language is widely distributed throughout the brain - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Language is widely distributed throughout the brain
www.nature.com
January 7, 2025 at 3:06 PM
The neurobiology of language does not operate in a vat. An important perspective from the @thelablab.bsky.social and colleagues: "Language is widely distributed throughout the brain" www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reposted by Uri Hasson
1/n Some time ago my colleague, excellent cook, and friend Ivan told me: "Cacio e pepe is the recipe that I screw up more often. Let's make a project studying systematically the physics of that sauce".
Prepare to get cheesy, I'm glad to share the Cacio e paper preprint:
arxiv.org/abs/2501.00536
Prepare to get cheesy, I'm glad to share the Cacio e paper preprint:
arxiv.org/abs/2501.00536
January 4, 2025 at 9:34 AM
1/n Some time ago my colleague, excellent cook, and friend Ivan told me: "Cacio e pepe is the recipe that I screw up more often. Let's make a project studying systematically the physics of that sauce".
Prepare to get cheesy, I'm glad to share the Cacio e paper preprint:
arxiv.org/abs/2501.00536
Prepare to get cheesy, I'm glad to share the Cacio e paper preprint:
arxiv.org/abs/2501.00536
Reposted by Uri Hasson
I'm at #NeurIPS2024 this week! Excited to present our work on perceptual alignment with Stephanie Fu on Thursday morning (poster #1302).
Please reach out if you want to chat about synthetic data, alignment, data-centric AI, representation learning, or anything else!
Please reach out if you want to chat about synthetic data, alignment, data-centric AI, representation learning, or anything else!
First up, "When Does Perceptual Alignment Benefit Vision Representations?" (arxiv.org/abs/2410.10817)
This paper is about distance between embeddings.
It says: measure how humans perceive distance, then adjust a neural net to match.
This improves transfer to lots of tasks (but not all tasks).
This paper is about distance between embeddings.
It says: measure how humans perceive distance, then adjust a neural net to match.
This improves transfer to lots of tasks (but not all tasks).
December 11, 2024 at 6:55 PM
I'm at #NeurIPS2024 this week! Excited to present our work on perceptual alignment with Stephanie Fu on Thursday morning (poster #1302).
Please reach out if you want to chat about synthetic data, alignment, data-centric AI, representation learning, or anything else!
Please reach out if you want to chat about synthetic data, alignment, data-centric AI, representation learning, or anything else!
Reposted by Uri Hasson
Neurobiology of Language is now on Blue Sky!
We'll continue exploring the intersections of the brain, speech and language while sharing cutting-edge research and real-world clinical insights. Follow us and join the conversation.
direct.mit.edu/nol
#Neurobiology #Language #Brain #Science
We'll continue exploring the intersections of the brain, speech and language while sharing cutting-edge research and real-world clinical insights. Follow us and join the conversation.
direct.mit.edu/nol
#Neurobiology #Language #Brain #Science
Neurobiology of Language | MIT Press
direct.mit.edu
November 3, 2024 at 9:45 PM
Neurobiology of Language is now on Blue Sky!
We'll continue exploring the intersections of the brain, speech and language while sharing cutting-edge research and real-world clinical insights. Follow us and join the conversation.
direct.mit.edu/nol
#Neurobiology #Language #Brain #Science
We'll continue exploring the intersections of the brain, speech and language while sharing cutting-edge research and real-world clinical insights. Follow us and join the conversation.
direct.mit.edu/nol
#Neurobiology #Language #Brain #Science
Reposted by Uri Hasson
If you think Bluesky is cool now, just wait until we start getting sophisticated feeds that curate cool papers, data, or code based on intelligent custom algorithms. This will become a second layer of scholarly communication.
November 25, 2024 at 1:49 PM
If you think Bluesky is cool now, just wait until we start getting sophisticated feeds that curate cool papers, data, or code based on intelligent custom algorithms. This will become a second layer of scholarly communication.
Reposted by Uri Hasson
Just realized BlueSky allows sharing valuable stuff cause it doesn't punish links. 🤩
Let's start with "What are embeddings" by @vickiboykis.com
The book is a great summary of embeddings, from history to modern approaches.
The best part: it's free.
Link: vickiboykis.com/what_are_emb...
Let's start with "What are embeddings" by @vickiboykis.com
The book is a great summary of embeddings, from history to modern approaches.
The best part: it's free.
Link: vickiboykis.com/what_are_emb...
November 22, 2024 at 11:13 AM
Just realized BlueSky allows sharing valuable stuff cause it doesn't punish links. 🤩
Let's start with "What are embeddings" by @vickiboykis.com
The book is a great summary of embeddings, from history to modern approaches.
The best part: it's free.
Link: vickiboykis.com/what_are_emb...
Let's start with "What are embeddings" by @vickiboykis.com
The book is a great summary of embeddings, from history to modern approaches.
The best part: it's free.
Link: vickiboykis.com/what_are_emb...
Reposted by Uri Hasson
After a great conference in Boston, CCN is going to take place in Amsterdam in 2025! To help the exchange of ideas between #neuroscience, cognitive science, and #AI, CCN will for the first time have full length paper submissions (alongside the established 2 pagers)! Info below👇
#NeuroAI #CompNeuro
#NeuroAI #CompNeuro
November 12, 2024 at 9:27 AM
After a great conference in Boston, CCN is going to take place in Amsterdam in 2025! To help the exchange of ideas between #neuroscience, cognitive science, and #AI, CCN will for the first time have full length paper submissions (alongside the established 2 pagers)! Info below👇
#NeuroAI #CompNeuro
#NeuroAI #CompNeuro
An updated version of our work on using feature maps of pre-trained DNNs to explain human similarity judgments; now on arXiv.
arxiv.org/abs/2409.16292
arxiv.org/abs/2409.16292
Explaining Human Comparisons using Alignment-Importance Heatmaps
We present a computational explainability approach for human comparison tasks, using Alignment Importance Score (AIS) heatmaps derived from deep-vision models. The AIS reflects a feature-map's...
arxiv.org
September 26, 2024 at 6:34 AM
An updated version of our work on using feature maps of pre-trained DNNs to explain human similarity judgments; now on arXiv.
arxiv.org/abs/2409.16292
arxiv.org/abs/2409.16292