Neural Twins

We develop deep learning models that predict the responses of neural populations to arbitrary sensory inputs. Starting from convolutional and recurrent architectures for mouse and primate visual cortex, our work has scaled to multi-modal foundation models trained on hundreds of billions of neural tokens (OmniMouse), latent-variable models that capture stimulus-independent neural dynamics, and probabilistic approaches that quantify uncertainty over neural responses. Through the Sensorium competition series, we also curate large-scale benchmark datasets and challenges that drive methodological progress across the community. These models are not endpoints — they are the substrate on which all downstream scientific analyses in the lab are built.

2026

Konstantin F. Willeke¹, Kelli Restivo¹, Katrin Franke, Arne F. Nix, Santiago A. Cadena, Tori Shinn, Cate Nealley, Gabby Rodriguez, Saumil Patel, Alexander S. Ecker, Fabian H. Sinz², Andreas S. Tolias² Deep learning-driven characterization of single cell tuning in primate visual area V4 supports topological organization eLife , equal contribution: ¹, ² reviewed preprint · neural twins biological computation · bioRxiv eLife
Konstantin Friedrich Willeke¹, Polina Turishcheva¹, Alex Gilbert¹, Goirik Chakrabarty, Hasan Atakan Bedel, Paul G. Fahey, Yongrong Qiu, Marissa A. Weis, Michaela Vystrčilová, Taliah Muhammad, Lydia Ntanavara, Rachel E Froebe, Kayla Ponder, Zheng Huan Tan, Emin Orhan, Erick Cobos, Sophia Sanborn, Katrin Franke, Fabian H. Sinz², Alexander S. Ecker², Andreas S. Tolias² OmniMouse: Scaling properties of multi-modal, multi-task Brain Models on 150B Neural Tokens ICLR 2026 , equal contribution: ¹, ² conference paper · neural twins · OpenReview

2025

Lisa Schmors, Dominic Gonschorek, Jan Niklas Böhm, Yongrong Qiu, Na Zhou, Dmitry Kobak, Andreas Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz, Jacob Reimer, Katrin Franke, Sebastian Damrich, Philipp Berens TRACE: Contrastive learning for multi-trial time-series data in neuroscience NeurIPS conference paper · neural twins · arXiv openreview
Finn Schmidt, Polina Turishcheva, Suhas Shrinivasan, Fabian Sinz Modeling dynamic neural activity by combining naturalistic video stimuli and stimulus-independent latent factors NeurIPS conference paper · neural twins · openreview
Zhuokun Ding, Paul G. Fahey, Stelios Papadopoulos, Eric Wang, Brendan Celii, Christos Papadopoulos, Alexander Kunin, Andersen Chang, Jiakun Fu, Zhiwei Ding, Saumil Patel, Kayla Ponder, J. Alexander Bae, Agnes L. Bodor, Derrick Brittain, JoAnn Buchanan, Daniel J. Bumbarger, Manuel A. Castro, Erick Cobos, Sven Dorkenwald, Leila Elabbady, Akhilesh Halageri, Zhen Jia, Chris Jordan, Dan Kapner, Nico Kemnitz, Sam Kinn, Kisuk Lee, Kai Li, Ran Lu, Thomas Macrina, Gayathri Mahalingam, Eric Mitchell, Shanka Subhra Mondal, Shang Mu, Barak Nehoran, Sergiy Popovych, Casey M. Schneider-Mizell, William Silversmith, Marc Takeno, Russel Torres, Nicholas L. Turner, William Wong, Jingpeng Wu, Wenjing Yin, Szi-chieh Yu, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Fabian H. Sinz, H. Sebastian Seung, Forrest Collman, Nuno Maçarico da Costa, R. Clay Reid, Edgar Y. Walker, Xaq Pitkow, Jacob Reimer, Andreas S. Tolias Functional connectomics reveals general wiring rule in mouse visual cortex Nature journal paper · neural twins biological computation · bioRxiv nature
Eric Y. Wang, Paul G. Fahey, Zhuokun Ding, Stelios Papadopoulos, Kayla Ponder, Marissa A. Weis, Andersen Chang, Taliah Muhammad, Saumil Patel, Zhiwei Ding, Dat Tran, Jiakun Fu, Casey M. Schneider-Mizell, R. Clay Reid, Forrest Collman, Nuno Maçarico da Costa, Katrin Franke, Alexander S. Ecker, Jacob Reimer, Xaq Pitkow, Fabian H. Sinz, Andreas S. Tolias Foundation model of neural activity predicts response to new stimulus types Nature journal paper · neural twins · bioRxiv nature
Brendan Celii, Stelios Papadopoulos, Zhuokun Ding, Paul G. Fahey, Eric Wang, Christos Papadopoulos, Alexander Kunin, Saumil Patel, J. Alexander Bae, Agnes L. Bodor, Derrick Brittain, JoAnn Buchanan, Daniel J. Bumbarger, Manuel A. Castro, Erick Cobos, Sven Dorkenwald, Leila Elabbady, Akhilesh Halageri, Zhen Jia, Chris Jordan, Dan Kapner, Nico Kemnitz, Sam Kinn, Kisuk Lee, Kai Li, Ran Lu, Thomas Macrina, Gayathri Mahalingam, Eric Mitchell, Shanka Subhra Mondal, Shang Mu, Barak Nehoran, Sergiy Popovych, Casey M. Schneider-Mizell, William Silversmith, Marc Takeno, Russel Torres, Nicholas L. Turner, William Wong, Jingpeng Wu, Szi-chieh Yu, Wenjing Yin, Daniel Xenes, Lindsey M. Kitchell, Patricia K. Rivlin, Victoria A. Rose, Caitlyn A. Bishop, Brock Wester, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Edgar Y. Walker, Fabian H. Sinz, H. Sebastian Seung, Forrest Collman, Nuno Maçarico da Costa, R. Clay Reid, Xaq Pitkow, Andreas S. Tolias, Jacob Reimer NEURD: automated proofreading and feature extraction for connectomics Nature journal paper · neural twins · bioRxiv nature
MICrONS Consortium, J. Alexander Bae, Mahaly Baptiste, Agnes L. Bodor, Derrick Brittain, JoAnn Buchanan, Daniel J. Bumbarger, Manuel A. Castro, Brendan Celii, Erick Cobos, Forrest Collman, Nuno Maçarico da Costa, Sven Dorkenwald, Leila Elabbady, Paul G. Fahey, Tim Fliss, Emmanouil Froudakis, Jay Gager, Clare Gamlin, Akhilesh Halageri, James Hebditch, Zhen Jia, Chris Jordan, Daniel Kapner, Nico Kemnitz, Sam Kinn, Selden Koolman, Kai Kuehner, Kisuk Lee, Kai Li, Ran Lu, Thomas Macrina, Gayathri Mahalingam, Sarah McReynolds, Elanine Miranda, Eric Mitchell, Shanka Subhra Mondal, Merlin Moore, Shang Mu, Taliah Muhammad, Barak Nehoran, Oluwaseun Ogedengbe, Christos Papadopoulos, Stelios Papadopoulos, Saumil Patel, Xaq Pitkow, Sergiy Popovych, Anthony Ramos, R. Clay Reid, Jacob Reimer, Casey M. Schneider-Mizell, H. Sebastian Seung, Ben Silverman, William Silversmith, Amy Sterling, Fabian H. Sinz, Cameron L. Smith, Shelby Suckow, Zheng H. Tan, Andreas S. Tolias, Russel Torres, Nicholas L. Turner, Edgar Y. Walker, Tianyu Wang, Grace Williams, Sarah Williams, Kyle Willie, Ryan Willie, William Wong, Jingpeng Wu, Chris Xu, Runzhe Yang, Dimitri Yatsenko, Fei Ye, Wenjing Yin, Szi-chieh Y Functional connectomics spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex Nature journal paper · neural twins · biorXiv nature

2024

Finn Schmidt, Suhas Shrinivasan¹, Polina Turishcheva¹, Fabian Sinz Modeling dynamic neural activity by combining naturalistic video stimuli and stimulus-independent latent factors NeuReps @ NeurIPS 2024 , equal contribution: ¹ workshop paper · neural twins · arXiv
Polina Turishcheva, Max Burg, Fabian H. Sinz, Alexander Ecker Reproducibility of predictive networks for mouse visual cortex NeurIPS conference paper · neural twins · NeurIPS (spotlight) arXiv
Polina Turishcheva, Paul G. Fahey, Michaela Vystrčilová, Laura Hansel, Rachel E Froebe, Kayla Ponder, Yongrong Qiu, Konstantin Friedrich Willeke, Mohammad Bashiri, Ruslan Baikulov, Yu Zhu, Lei Ma, Shan Yu, Tiejun Huang, Bryan M. Li, Wolf De Wulf, Nina Kudryashova, Matthias H. Hennig, Nathalie Rochefort, Arno Onken, Eric Wang, Zhiwei Ding, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz, Alexander S Ecker Retrospective for the Dynamic Sensorium Competition for predicting large-scale mouse primary visual cortex activity from videos NeurIPS 2024 conference paper · neural twins · competition page OpenReview
Nan Wu, Isabel Valera, Fabian H. Sinz, Alexander Ecker, Thomas Euler, Yongrong Qiu Probabilistic Neural Transfer Function Estimation with Bayesian System Identification PLoS CB journal paper · neural twins · arXiv PLoS CB
Taesung Jung, Nanyu Zeng, Jason D. Fabbri, Guy Eichler, Zhe Li, Konstantin Willeke, Katie E. Wingel, Agrita Dubey, Rizwan Huq, Mohit Sharma, Yaoxing Hu, Girish Ramakrishnan, Kevin Tien, Paolo Mantovani, Abhinav Parihar, Heyu Yin, Denise Oswalt, Alexander Misdorp, Ilke Uguz, Tori Shinn, Gabrielle J. Rodriguez, Cate Nealley, Ian Gonzales, Michael Roukes, Jeffrey Knecht, Daniel Yoshor, Peter Canoll, Eleonora Spinazzi, Luca P. Carloni, Bijan Pesaran, Saumil Patel, Brett Youngerman, R. James Cotton, Andreas Tolias, Kenneth L. Shepard Stable, chronic in-vivo recordings from a fully wireless subdural-contained 65,536-electrode brain-computer interface device bioRxiv preprint · neural twins restoring function · bioRxiv

2023

Pawel A. Pierzchlewicz, Konstantin F. Willeke, Arne F. Nix, Pavithra Elumalai, Kelli Restivo, Tori Shinn, Cate Nealley, Gabrielle Rodriguez, Saumil Patel, Katrin Franke, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz Energy Guided Diffusion for Generating Neurally Exciting Images NeurIPS conference paper · biological computation neural twins · bioRxiv github paper · project page
Konstantin F. Willeke, Paul G. Fahey, Mohammad Bashiri, Laura Hansel, Christoph Blessing, Konstantin-Klemens Lurz, Max F. Burg, Santiago A. Cadena, Zhiwei Ding, Kayla Ponder, Taliah Muhammad, Saumil S. Patel, Kaiwen Deng, Yuanfang Guan, Yiqin Zhu, Kaiwen Xiao, Xiao Han, Simone Azeglio, Ulisse Ferrari, Peter Neri, Olivier Marre, Adrian Hoffmann, Kirill Fedyanin, Kirill Vishniakov, Maxim Panov, Subash Prakash, Kishan Naik, Kantharaju Narayanappa, Alexander S. Ecker, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz Retrospective on the SENSORIUM 2022 competition Proceedings of Machine Learning Research journal paper · neural twins · competition page PMLR pdf
Polina Turishcheva, Paul G. Fahey, Laura Hansel, Rachel Froebe, Kayla Ponder, Michaela Vystrčilová, Konstantin F. Willeke, Mohammad Bashiri, Eric Wang, Zhiwei Ding, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz, Alexander S. Ecker The Dynamic Sensorium competition for predicting large-scale mouse visual cortex activity from videos arXiv preprint · neural twins · arXiv
Konstantin-Klemens Lurz¹, Mohammad Bashiri¹, Edgar Y. Walker, Fabian H. Sinz Bayesian Oracle for bounding information gain in neural encoding models ICLR 2023 , equal contribution: ¹ conference paper · neural twins · openreview code video

2022

Erick Cobos, Taliah Muhammad, Paul G Fahey, Zhiwei Ding, Zhuokun Ding, Jacob Reimer, Fabian H. Sinz, Andreas Tolias It takes neurons to understand neurons: Digital twins of visual cortex synthesize neural metamers biorXiv preprint · neural twins biological computation · biorXiv
Konstantin Lurz, Mohammad Bashiri, Fabian Sinz Bayesian Oracle for bounding information gain in neural encoding models Neurips 2022 Workshop InfoCog workshop paper · neural twins ·
Konstantin F. Willeke, Paul G. Fahey, Mohammad Bashiri, Laura Pede, Max F. Burg, Christoph Blessing, Santiago A. Cadena, Zhiwei Ding, Konstantin-Klemens Lurz, Kayla Ponder, Taliah Muhammad, Saumil S. Patel, Alexander S. Ecker, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz The Sensorium competition on predicting large-scale mouse primary visual cortex activity arXiv preprint · neural twins · arXiv challenge data

2021

Mohammad Bashiri, Edgar Y. Walker, Konstantin-Klemens Lurz, Akshay Kumar Jagadish, Taliah Muhammad, Zhiwei Ding, Zhuokun Ding, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz A flow-based latent state generative model of neural population responses to natural images NeurIPS (spotlight) conference paper · neural twins · openreview twitter teaser-youtube talk-youtube github simulation demo biorXiv
Max F. Burg, Santiago A. Cadena, George H. Denfield, Edgar Y. Walker, Leon A. Gatys, Andreas S. Tolias, Matthias Bethge, Alexander S. Ecker Learning Divisive Normalization in Primary Visual Cortex PLoS Computational Biology journal paper · neural twins biological computation · bioRxiv PLoSCB
Konstantin-Klemens Lurz, Mohammad Bashiri, Konstantin Friedrich Willeke, Akshay Kumar Jagadish, Eric Wang, Edgar Y Walker, Santiago Cadena, Taliah Muhammad, Eric Cobos, Andreas Tolias, Alexander Ecker, Fabian Sinz Generalization in data-driven models of primary visual cortex ICLR (spotlight) conference paper · neural twins · openreview bioRxiv twitter data code youtube

2020

James R. Cotton, Fabian H. Sinz, Andreas S. Tolias Factorized Neural Processes for Neural Processes: K-Shot Prediction of Neural Responses NeurIPS conference paper · neural twins · proceedings arXiv youtube data code

2019

Edgar Y. Walker¹, Fabian H. Sinz¹, Erick Cobos, Taliah Muhammad, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Paul G. Fahey, Alexander S. Ecker, Jacob Reimer, Xaq Pitkow, Andreas S. Tolias Inception loops discover what excites neurons most using deep predictive models Nature Neuroscience , equal contribution: ¹ journal paper · neural twins biological computation · bioRxiv Nature Neuroscience github
Santiago A. Cadena, Fabian H. Sinz, Taliah Muhammad, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Erick Cobos, Edgar Y. Walker, Jake Reimer, Matthias Bethge, Andreas Tolias, Alexander S. Ecker How well do deep neural networks trained on object recognition characterize the mouse visual system? NeurIPS workshop on Real Neurons & Hidden Units (accepted for talk) workshop paper · neural twins · openreview
Alexander S. Ecker, Fabian H. Sinz, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Paul G. Fahey, Santiago A. Cadena, Edgar Y. Walker, Erick Cobos, Jacob Reimer, Andreas S. Tolias, Matthias Bethge A rotation-equivariant convolutional neural network model of primary visual cortex ICLR 2019 conference paper · neural twins · arXiv openreview code
S. A. Cadena, G. H. Denfield, E. Y. Walker, L. A. Gatys, A. S. Tolias, M. Bethge, and A. S. Ecker Deep convolutional models improve predictions of macaque V1 responses to natural images PLoS Computational Biology journal paper · neural twins · PLoS

2018

Fabian H. Sinz, Alexander S. Ecker, Paul G. Fahey, Edgar Y. Walker, Erick Cobos, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Dimitri Yatsenko, Xaq Pitkow, Jacob Reimer, Andreas S. Tolias Stimulus domain transfer in recurrent models for large scale cortical population prediction on video NeurIPS conference paper · neural twins · bioRxiv NeurIPS code data