George Alvarez
@grez72
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Cognitive Scientist, co-Director of the Vision Sciences Laboratory at Harvard University, Department of Psychology
Belmont, MA
Joined April 2009
I'm hiring a postdoc in the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard, run jointly with @talia_konkle. If you're interested in using deep neural network models to understand human visual processing & human intuitive physical reasoning, please apply here
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🕳️🐇Into the Rabbit Hull – Part I (Part II tomorrow) An interpretability deep dive into DINOv2, one of vision’s most important foundation models. And today is Part I, buckle up, we're exploring some of its most charming features.
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This is a deeply enjoyable walk through how a vision foundation model actually works.
🕳️🐇Into the Rabbit Hull – Part I (Part II tomorrow) An interpretability deep dive into DINOv2, one of vision’s most important foundation models. And today is Part I, buckle up, we're exploring some of its most charming features.
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Current theories of consciousness are 'meat-neutral', but if specific physical substrates are necessary, AI may never achieve consciousness. Understanding whether consciousness depends on computational roles, 5/
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Your pupils don’t just track light. They are a doorway to the dynamics of your entire brain. A new Nature paper shows pupil size alone can reconstruct second-by-second brain activity.
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Proud to release ShinkaEvolve, our open-source framework that evolves programs for scientific discovery with very good sample-efficiency! 🐙 Paper: https://t.co/05rjMiSxOL Blog: https://t.co/yjuvV0xpif Project:
github.com
ShinkaEvolve: Towards Open-Ended and Sample-Efficient Program Evolution - SakanaAI/ShinkaEvolve
We’re excited to introduce ShinkaEvolve: An open-source framework that evolves programs for scientific discovery with unprecedented sample-efficiency. Blog: https://t.co/Bj32AGXC3T Code: https://t.co/UMCSQaeOhd Like AlphaEvolve and its variants, our framework leverages LLMs to
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Excited to share new work with @H_Lee_Masson, Ericka Wodka, @SHMostofsky and Leyla Isik! We investigated how simultaneous vision and language signals are combined in the brain using naturalistic+controlled fMRI. Read the paper here: https://t.co/vvmJOcjI4s 1/n
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Dream research environment. Seriously. Feel free to DM if you have any question 🤠
Applications are now open for our #KempnerInstitute Research Fellowships! Postdocs studying the foundations of #intelligence or applications of #AI are encouraged to apply. Learn more and apply by Oct. 1: https://t.co/R82ADXfur0
#LLMs #NeuroAI #ML @ShamKakade6 @blsabatini
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Excited to share that our paper has been accepted at #NeurIPS2025 ! Huge thanks to all my collaborators 🙌 Check out the details in the thread below ⬇️
🧵 What if two images have the same local parts but represent different global shapes purely through part arrangement? Humans can spot the difference instantly! The question is can vision models do the same? 1/15
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🧵 Can a purely feedforward network — with no recurrence or lateral connections — capture human-like perceptual organization? 🤯 Yes! Especially for contour integration, and we pinpoint the key inductive biases. New paper in @PLOSCompBiol with @talia_konkle & @grez72! 1/24
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Applications are now open for our #KempnerInstitute Research Fellowships! Postdocs studying the foundations of #intelligence or applications of #AI are encouraged to apply. Learn more and apply by Oct. 1: https://t.co/R82ADXfur0
#LLMs #NeuroAI #ML @ShamKakade6 @blsabatini
kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu
The Kempner brings leading, early-stage postdoctoral scientists to Harvard to work on projects that advance the fundamental understanding of intelligence.
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#CCN2025 begins tomorrow! Check out the presentations from the #kempnerinstitute. #NeuroAI #neuroscience
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In this piece published in The Hill, fellow Turing laureate David Patterson points out that the return on investment of government-funded research in universities is gigantic. Cutting the budgets of NSF and NIH is economic suicide. https://t.co/NmAsI5JXQG
thehill.com
Virtually every smartphone on the planet runs on a chip paid for by American taxpayers — a chip that I helped invent. Now Congress is moving to cut funding for the National Science Foundation that …
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A team from #KempnerInstitute, @hseas & @UTCompSci has won a best paper award at #ICML2025 for work unlocking the potential of masked diffusion models. Congrats to @Jaeyeon_Kim_0, @shahkulin98, Vasilis Kontonis, @ShamKakade6 and @sitanch. https://t.co/RyoDM6jwLm
#AI
kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu
A paper authored by Kempner Institute researchers and collaborators has won an outstanding paper award at ICML 2025, the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, held July 13 – 19, […]
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🧵 What if two images have the same local parts but represent different global shapes purely through part arrangement? Humans can spot the difference instantly! The question is can vision models do the same? 1/15
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To help computational cognitive scientist engage with more naturalistic experiments, I've made NiceWebRL. NiceWebRL is a Python library for designing human subject experiments that leverage machine reinforcement learning environments. https://t.co/ogdXTEX9Ha
github.com
NiceWebRL is a Python library for quickly making human subject experiments that leverage machine reinforcement learning environments. - KempnerInstitute/nicewebrl
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Our computer vision textbook is now available for free online here: https://t.co/ERy2Spc7c2 We are working on adding some interactive components like search and (beta) integration with LLMs. Hope this is useful and feel free to submit Github issues to help us improve the text!
visionbook.mit.edu
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🎙️ Next up in the NeuroAI Emerging Leaders Webinar Series! We’re thrilled to host @t_andy_keller on May 8th, sharing his latest work at the frontier of NeuroAI. 📍 Register for free! https://t.co/XLKUOW7Iaa 🔗 Find out more: https://t.co/WwCXHDDB5K
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saying “no circuits” is like claiming there are no roads in a city, just cars moving around. sure, traffic depends on where people go — but some paths get paved. put differently: meaning may be relational, but some relations — like induction heads and edge detectors —
@Napoolar @basedneoleo There are no mechanisms or circuits
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