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Yizi Zhang

7 accepted papers

2026

Animal behavioral analysis and neural encoding with transformer-based self-supervised pretraining

ICLR 2026poster

The brain can only be fully understood through the lens of the behavior it generates--a guiding principle in modern neuroscience research that nevertheless presents significant technical challenges. Many studies capture behavior with cameras, but video analysis approaches typically rely on specializ…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Decoding Inner Speech with an End-to-End Brain-to-Text Neural Interface

ICLR 2026poster

Speech brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) aim to restore communication for people with paralysis by translating neural activity into text. Most systems use cascaded frameworks that decode phonemes before assembling sentences with an n-gram language model (LM), preventing joint optimization of all stag…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Inpainting the Neural Picture: Inferring Unrecorded Brain Area Dynamics from Multi-Animal Datasets

NeurIPS 2025poster

Characterizing interactions between brain areas is a fundamental goal of systems neuroscience. While such analyses are possible when areas are recorded simultaneously, it is rare to observe all combinations of areas of interest within a single animal or recording session. How can we leverage multi-a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Neural Encoding and Decoding at Scale

ICML 2025spotlight

Recent work has demonstrated that large-scale, multi-animal models are powerful tools for characterizing the relationship between neural activity and behavior. Current large-scale approaches, however, focus exclusively on either predicting neural activity from behavior (encoding) or predicting behav…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

TimeInf: Time Series Data Contribution via Influence Functions

ICLR 2025poster

Evaluating the contribution of individual data points to a model's prediction is critical for interpreting model predictions and improving model performance. Existing data contribution methods have been applied to various data types, including tabular data, images, and text; however, their primary f…

2024

Towards a "Universal Translator" for Neural Dynamics at Single-Cell, Single-Spike Resolution

NeurIPS 2024poster

Neuroscience research has made immense progress over the last decade, but our understanding of the brain remains fragmented and piecemeal: the dream of probing an arbitrary brain region and automatically reading out the information encoded in its neural activity remains out of reach. In this work, w…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Bypassing spike sorting: Density-based decoding using spike localization from dense multielectrode probes

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Neural decoding and its applications to brain computer interfaces (BCI) are essential for understanding the association between neural activity and behavior. A prerequisite for many decoding approaches is spike sorting, the assignment of action potentials (spikes) to individual neurons. Current spik…