ARNI Frontier Models for Neuroscience and Behavior Working Group (Priorly: Animal Behavior)

Description: Advances in neurotechnology and behavioral tracking have enabled the collection of large-scale neural and behavioral datasets, offering new opportunities to study brain function in complex settings. However, researchers face significant challenges in integrating and analyzing data across different brain regions, individuals, and behavioral contexts. Inspired by recent successes in large-scale “foundation” models in natural language and computational biology, there is growing interest in developing both neurofoundation models—which learn from diverse neural recordings—and behavior foundation models—which capture structure in high-dimensional behavioral data. These models can be used for downstream tasks such as neural encoding and decoding, cell-type classification, and behavioral prediction. The goal of this working group is to explore this emerging field, address challenges in scaling these models, identify needs for benchmarks and tools to accelerate progress, and determine how these models can be used to answer scientific questions in both neuroscience and behavioral research.

Meeting Description: Our inaugural meeting will begin with a short talk summarizing the landscape of foundation models for neuroscience and behavior, highlighting recent advances, key challenges, and opportunities for improvement. This will be followed by an open discussion to define the group’s collaborative focus and shared priorities.

Zoom Link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/95445157877?pwd=FawUA2r6I1bxMN3W2uyok4YtF6QdpZ.1