Biological Computation
Once a digital twin faithfully captures neural activity, it becomes a powerful tool for scientific discovery. We use techniques such as most-exciting-input (MEI) optimization, inception loops, and invariance manifold learning to reveal what individual neurons and populations encode — uncovering phenomena like bipartite invariance in V1, dual-feature selectivity, state-dependent gain modulation, and contextual pattern completion. Complementing this data-driven approach, we develop normative theories that ask why the brain computes the way it does. One goal is the transfer of inductive biases between biological and artificial networks: insights from cortical computation inform better machine learning architectures, and modern ML tools sharpen our understanding of the brain.
2026
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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
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Katrin Franke, Nikos Karantzas, Konstantin Willeke, Maria Diamantaki, Kandan Ramakrishnan, Pavithra Elumalai, Kelli Restivo, Paul Fahey, Cate Nealley, Tori Shinn, Gabrielle Garcia, Saumil Patel, Alexander Ecker, Edgar Y. Walker, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Sophia Sanborn, Fabian H. Sinz, Andreas Tolias
Dual-feature selectivity enables bidirectional coding in visual cortical neurons
eLife
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Zhiwei Ding1, Dat T. Tran1, Kayla Ponder, Zhuokun Ding, Rachel Froebe, Lydia Ntanavara, Paul G. Fahey, Erick Cobos, Luca Baroni, Maria Diamantaki, Eric Y. Wang, Andersen Chang, Stelios Papadopoulos, Jiakun Fu, Taliah Muhammad, Christos Papadopoulos, Santiago A. Cadena, Alexandros Evangelou, Konstantin Willeke, Fabio Anselmi, Sophia Sanborn, Jan Antolik, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Saumil Patel, Edgar Y. Walker, Jacob Reimer, Fabian H. Sinz, Alexander S. Ecker, Katrin Franke, Xaq Pitkow, and Andreas S. Tolias
Functional bipartite invariance in mouse primary visual cortex receptive fields
Nature Neuroscience
, equal contribution: 1
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2025
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Jiakun Fu, Suhas Shrinivasan, Luca Baroni, Zhuokun Ding, Paul G. Fahey, Paweł Pierzchlewicz, Kayla Ponder, Rachel Froebe, Lydia Ntanavara, Taliah Muhammad, Konstantin F Willeke, Eric Wang, Zhiwei Ding, Dat T. Tran, Stelios Papadopoulos, Saumil Patel, Jacob Reimer, Alexander S. Ecker, Xaq Pitkow, Jan Antolik, Fabian H. Sinz, Ralf M. Haefner, Andreas S. Tolias, Katrin Franke
Pattern completion and disruption characterize contextual modulation in the visual cortex
Neuron (accepted in principle)
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Pavithra Elumalai, Mohammad Bashiri, Goirik Chakrabarty, Suhas Shrinivasan, Fabian H. Sinz
Beyond Pixels: A Differentiable Pipeline for Probing Neuronal Selectivity in 3D
NeurReps @ NeurIPS 2025
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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
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Mohammad Bashiri1, Luca Baroni1, Jan Antolik, Fabian H. Sinz
Learning and aligning single-neuron invariance manifolds in visual cortex
ICLR (oral; <1.8% submissions; 34. overall; 1. neuroscience)
, equal contribution: 1
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2024
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Suhas Shrinivasan, Ralf Häfner, Fabian Sinz, Edgar Y. Walker
Towards zero-shot adaptation of predictive models of neurons encoding posterior probability
NeurNeuroAI @ NeurIPS 2024
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Jiakun Fu, Pawel A. Pierzchlewicz, Konstantin F. Willeke, Mohammad Bashiri, Taliah Muhammad, Maria Diamantaki, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Kelli Restivo, Kayla Ponder, George H. Denfield, Fabian H. Sinz, Andreas S. Tolias, Katrin Franke
Heterogeneous orientation tuning in primary visual cortex of mice diverges from Gabor-like receptive fields in primates
Cell Reports
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Santiago A. Cadena, Konstantin F. Willeke, Kelli Restivo, George Denfield, Fabian H. Sinz, Matthias Bethge, Andreas S. Tolias, Alexander S. Ecker
Diverse task-driven modeling of macaque V4 reveals functional specialization towards semantic tasks
PLoS Computational Biology
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2023
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Max F. Burg, Thomas Zenkel, Michaela Vystrčilová, Jonathan Oesterle, Larissa Höfling, Konstantin F. Willeke, Jan Lause, Sarah Müller, Paul G. Fahey, Zhiwei Ding, Kelli Restivo, Shashwat Sridhar, Tim Gollisch, Philipp Berens, Andreas S. Tolias, Thomas Euler, Matthias Bethge, Alexander S. Ecker
Most discriminative stimuli for functional cell type identification
arXiv
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Suhas Shrinivasan, Konstantin-Klemens Lurz, Kelli Restivo, George Denfield, Andreas S. Tolias, Edgar Y. Walker1, Fabian H. Sinz1
Taking the neural sampling code very seriously: A data-driven approach for assessing generative models of the visual system
NeurIPS
, equal contribution: 1
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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
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Arne Nix, Max Burg, Fabian Sinz
HARD: Hard Augmentations for Robust Distillation
arXiv
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Suhas Shrinivasan, Andreas S. Tolias, Edgar Y. Walker*, Fabian H. Sinz*
Fitting normative neural sampling hypothesis models to neuronal response data
COSYNE 2023
, equal contribution: *
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2022
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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
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Arne Nix, Max Burg, Fabian Sinz
Leading by example: Guiding knowledge transfer with adversarial data augmentation
Neurips 2022 Workshop SyntheticData4ML
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Luca Baroni1, Mohammad Bashiri1, Konstantin Friedrich Willeke, Ján Antolík, Fabian Sinz
Learning Invariance Manifolds of Visual Sensory Neurons
Neurips 2022 Workshop NeurReps
, equal contribution: 1
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Katrin Franke1, Konstantin F. Willeke1, Kayla Ponder, Mario Galdamez, Taliah Muhammad, Saumil Patel, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Jacob Reimer, Fabian H. Sinz, Andreas S. Tolias
State-dependent pupil dilation rapidly shifts visual feature selectivity
Nature
, equal contribution: 1
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Shan Shen, Xiaolong Jiang, Federico Scala, Jiakun Fu, Paul Fahey, Dimitry Kobak, Zhenghuan Tan, Jacob Reimer, Fabian H. Sinz, Andreas S. Tolias
Distinct organization of two cortico-cortical feedback pathways
Nature Communications
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Arne Nix, Suhas Shrinivasan, Edgar Y. Walker, Fabian H. Sinz
Can Functional Transfer Methods Capture Simple Inductive Biases?
AISTATS 2022
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2021
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Shahd Safarani, Arne Nix, Konstantin Willeke, Santiago A. Cadena, Kelli Restivo, George Denfield, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz
Towards robust vision by multi-task learning on monkey visual cortex
NeurIPS
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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
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Shahd Safarani, Arne Nix, Konstantin Willeke, Santiago A. Cadena, Kelli Restivo, George Denfield, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz
Towards robust vision by multi-task learning on monkey visual cortex
ICLR 2021 Workshop: How Can Findings About The Brain Improve AI Systems?
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2020
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Fabian H. Sinz, Carolin Sachgau, Jörg Henninger, Jan Benda, Jan Grewe
Simultaneous spike-time locking to multiple frequencies
Journal of Neurophysiology 123(6)
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Ivan Ustyuzhaninov, Santiago A. Cadena, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Paul G. Fahey, Edgar Y. Walker, Erick Cobos, Jacob Reimer, Fabian H. Sinz, Andreas S. Tolias, Matthias Bethge, Alexander S. Ecker
Rotation-invariant clustering of functional cell types in primary visual cortex
ICLR (oral)
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Cathryn R. Cadwell, Federico Scala, Paul G Fahey, Dmitry Kobak, Fabian H. Sinz, Per Johnsson, Shuang Li, R. James Cotton, Rickard Sandberg, Philipp Berens, Xiaolong Jiang, Andreas S. Tolias
Cell type composition and circuit organization of clonally related excitatory neurons in the juvenile mouse neocortex
eLife
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Jörg Henninger, Fabian Sinz, Ruediger Krahe, Jan Benda
Tracking activity patterns of a multispecies community of gymnotiform weakly electric fish in their neotropical habitat without tagging
Journal of Experimental Biology
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2019
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Edgar Y. Walker, R. James Cotton, Wei Ji Ma, Andreas S. Tolias
A neural basis of probabilistic computation in visual cortex
Nature Neuroscience (accepted)
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Zhe Li, Wieland Brendel, Edgar Walker, Erick Cobos, Taliah Muhammad, Jacob Reimer, Matthias Bethge, Fabian Sinz, Xaq Pitkow, Andreas Tolias
Learning from brains how to regularize machines
NeurIPS (accepted)
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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
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Fabian H. Sinz, Xaq Pitkow, Jacob Reimer, Matthias Bethge, Andreas S. Tolias
Engineering a less artificial intelligence
Neuron 103(6)
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Christoph Blessing, Edgar Y. Walker, Katrina R. Quinn, R. James Cotton, Wei Ji Ma, Andreas S. Tolias, Hendrikje Nienborg, Fabian H. Sinz
Neural Likelihood
Cognitive Computational Neuroscience
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Paul G. Fahey, Taliah Muhammad, Cameron Smith, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Erick Cobos, Jiakun Fu, Edgar Y. Walker, Dimitri Yatsenko, Fabian H. Sinz, Jacob Reimer, Andreas S. Tolias
A global map of orientation tuning in mouse visual cortex
biorxiv
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