Mohammad Bashiri

Graduate Student

My interest lies in identifying regularities underlying neural computations that contribute to data-efficient learning and robust inference. These regularities are commonly framed as tuning where the activity of many neurons is sensitive to a common axis (aka tuning axis) in the input space. For instance, in the context of the visual system, many neurons have similar receptive fields but each is rotated differently, which makes the rotation angle the tuning axis. The questions I am currently working on are: 1) What other regularities are there in the computations performed by cortical neuronal populations? 2) Can we develop methods that automatically discover tuning in a given multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) system? And 3) How can we use models to design experiments such that we can control the activity of neuronal populations and ultimately control learning and inference. To answer these questions I use deep neural networks as models of the visual system and work with large scale neuro-physiological and -anatomical data.

Lab members are shown in this color.

2025

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 workshop paper · system identification · arXiv
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 conference paper · system identification · OpenReview GitHub

2024

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 · system identification · competition page OpenReview
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 journal paper · inception loops neuroscience · cell press
Mohammad Bashiri PhD Thesis, International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen phd thesis · system identification · pdf

2023

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 · system identification · 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 · system identification · arXiv
Paweł A. Pierzchlewicz, Mohammad Bashiri, R. James Cotton, Fabian H. Sinz Optimizing MPJPE promotes miscalibration in multi-hypothesis human pose lifting ICLR - tiny paper conference paper · pose · openreview
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 · system identification · openreview code video

2022

Paweł A. Pierzchlewicz, R. James Cotton, Mohammad Bashiri, Fabian H. Sinz Multi-hypothesis 3D human pose estimation metrics favor miscalibrated distributions arXiv preprint · pose · arXiv
Konstantin Lurz, Mohammad Bashiri, Fabian Sinz Bayesian Oracle for bounding information gain in neural encoding models Neurips 2022 Workshop InfoCog workshop paper · system identification ·
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 workshop paper · system identification · PMLR pdf
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 · system identification · 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 · system identification · openreview twitter teaser-youtube talk-youtube github simulation demo biorXiv
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 · system identification · openreview bioRxiv twitter data code youtube