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Daniel Durstewitz

19 accepted papers

2026

Continuous-Time Piecewise-Linear Recurrent Neural Networks

ICML 2026poster

In dynamical systems reconstruction (DSR) we aim to recover the dynamical system (DS) underlying observed time series. Specifically, we aim to learn a generative surrogate model which approximates the underlying, data-generating DS, and recreates its long-term properties (`climate statistics'). In s…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Position: Why a Dynamical Systems Perspective is Needed to Advance Time Series Modeling

ICML 2026poster

Time series (TS) modeling has come a long way from early statistical, mainly linear, approaches to the current trend in TS foundation models. With a lot of hype and industrial demand in this field, it is not always clear how much progress there really is. To advance TS forecasting and analysis to th…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2025

Learning Interpretable Hierarchical Dynamical Systems Models from Time Series Data

ICLR 2025poster

In science, we are often interested in obtaining a generative model of the underlying system dynamics from observed time series. While powerful methods for dynamical systems reconstruction (DSR) exist when data come from a single domain, how to best integrate data from multiple dynamical regimes and…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2025

True Zero-Shot Inference of Dynamical Systems Preserving Long-Term Statistics

NeurIPS 2025poster

Complex, temporally evolving phenomena, from climate to brain activity, are governed by dynamical systems (DS). DS reconstruction (DSR) seeks to infer generative surrogate models of these from observed data, reproducing their long-term behavior. Existing DSR approaches require purpose-training for a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

A scalable generative model for dynamical system reconstruction from neuroimaging data

NeurIPS 2024poster

Data-driven inference of the generative dynamics underlying a set of observed time series is of growing interest in machine learning and the natural sciences. In neuroscience, such methods promise to alleviate the need to handcraft models based on biophysical principles and allow to automatize the i…

2024

Almost-Linear RNNs Yield Highly Interpretable Symbolic Codes in Dynamical Systems Reconstruction

NeurIPS 2024poster

Dynamical systems theory (DST) is fundamental for many areas of science and engineering. It can provide deep insights into the behavior of systems evolving in time, as typically described by differential or recursive equations. A common approach to facilitate mathematical tractability and interpreta…

2024

Integrating Multimodal Data for Joint Generative Modeling of Complex Dynamics

ICML 2024poster

Many, if not most, systems of interest in science are naturally described as nonlinear dynamical systems. Empirically, we commonly access these systems through time series measurements. Often such time series may consist of discrete random variables rather than continuous measurements, or may be com…

2024

Optimal Recurrent Network Topologies for Dynamical Systems Reconstruction

ICML 2024poster

In dynamical systems reconstruction (DSR) we seek to infer from time series measurements a generative model of the underlying dynamical process. This is a prime objective in any scientific discipline, where we are particularly interested in parsimonious models with a low parameter load. A common str…

2024

Out-of-Domain Generalization in Dynamical Systems Reconstruction

ICML 2024poster

In science we are interested in finding the governing equations, the dynamical rules, underlying empirical phenomena. While traditionally scientific models are derived through cycles of human insight and experimentation, recently deep learning (DL) techniques have been advanced to reconstruct dynami…

2023

Bifurcations and loss jumps in RNN training

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are popular machine learning tools for modeling and forecasting sequential data and for inferring dynamical systems (DS) from observed time series. Concepts from DS theory (DST) have variously been used to further our understanding of both, how trained RNNs solve com…

2023

Generalized Teacher Forcing for Learning Chaotic Dynamics

ICML 2023oral

Chaotic dynamical systems (DS) are ubiquitous in nature and society. Often we are interested in reconstructing such systems from observed time series for prediction or mechanistic insight, where by reconstruction we mean learning geometrical and invariant temporal properties of the system in questio…

2022

On the difficulty of learning chaotic dynamics with RNNs

NeurIPS 2022accept

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are wide-spread machine learning tools for modeling sequential and time series data. They are notoriously hard to train because their loss gradients backpropagated in time tend to saturate or diverge during training. This is known as the exploding and vanishing gradi…

2022

Reconstructing Nonlinear Dynamical Systems from Multi-Modal Time Series

ICML 2022spotlight

Empirically observed time series in physics, biology, or medicine, are commonly generated by some underlying dynamical system (DS) which is the target of scientific interest. There is an increasing interest to harvest machine learning methods to reconstruct this latent DS in a data-driven, unsupervi…

2022

Tractable Dendritic RNNs for Reconstructing Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

ICML 2022spotlight

In many scientific disciplines, we are interested in inferring the nonlinear dynamical system underlying a set of observed time series, a challenging task in the face of chaotic behavior and noise. Previous deep learning approaches toward this goal often suffered from a lack of interpretability and…

2021

Identifying nonlinear dynamical systems with multiple time scales and long-range dependencies

ICLR 2021spotlight

A main theoretical interest in biology and physics is to identify the nonlinear dynamical system (DS) that generated observed time series. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are, in principle, powerful enough to approximate any underlying DS, but in their vanilla form suffer from the exploding vs. vani…

Cited by 48SourcePDFScholar
2020

Transformation of ReLU-based recurrent neural networks from discrete-time to continuous-time

ICML 2020poster

Recurrent neural networks (RNN) as used in machine learning are commonly formulated in discrete time, i.e. as recursive maps. This brings a lot of advantages for training models on data, e.g. for the purpose of time series prediction or dynamical systems identification, as powerful and efficient inf…

2019

LeMoNADe: Learned Motif and Neuronal Assembly Detection in calcium imaging videos

ICLR 2019poster

Neuronal assemblies, loosely defined as subsets of neurons with reoccurring spatio-temporally coordinated activation patterns, or "motifs", are thought to be building blocks of neural representations and information processing. We here propose LeMoNADe, a new exploratory data analysis method that fa…

2017

Sparse convolutional coding for neuronal assembly detection

NeurIPS 2017poster

Cell assemblies, originally proposed by Donald Hebb (1949), are subsets of neurons firing in a temporally coordinated way that gives rise to repeated motifs supposed to underly neural representations and information processing. Although Hebb's original proposal dates back many decades, the detection…