Publications

We are pleased to announce that the paper "What Should a Neuron Aim For? Designing Local Objective Functions Based on Information Theory", authored by Valentin Neuhaus & Andreas C. Schneider from our RTG, has been accepted for an oral presentation at the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025), which will take place on April 24, 2025, in Singapore. This work proposes a framework in which individual neurons optimize local information-theoretic objectives, enabling self-organization and efficient information distribution across neural networks. The paper will be presented during one of the conference’s oral sessions by RTG member Andreas C. Schneider. Further details can be found here. Valentin Neuhaus will also present the work in a poster session at ICLR 2025.

Congratulations to Viola Priesemann, Andreas Schneider, and Michael Wibral on co-authoring a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In their paper, “A general framework for interpretable neural learning based on local information-theoretic goal functions”, they examine which learning goals individual computational elements must pursue to contribute to a network-level task solution. Read more here.

Maik Mylius has published his Master's thesis. In his study - "Meditation expertise influences response bias and prestimulus alpha activity in the somatosensory signal detection task" - Maik investigated the proposed mechanism of mindfulness, itsimpact on body awareness and interoception, and its potential benefits for mental and physical health. Read more here.