activity
20242026
collaborators

7 papers

stat.ML2026

Metabolic cost of information processing in Poisson variational autoencoders

Hadi Vafaii, Jacob L. Yates

Computation in biological systems is fundamentally energy-constrained, yet standard theories of computation treat energy as freely available. Here, we argue that variational free e…

stat.ML2026

A hitchhiker's guide to Poisson gradient estimation

Michael Ibrahim, Hanqi Zhao, Eli Sennesh +5

Poisson-distributed latent variable models are widely used in computational neuroscience, but differentiating through discrete stochastic samples remains challenging. Two approache…

eess.IV2026

Event2Audio: Event-Based Optical Vibration Sensing

Mingxuan Cai, Dekel Galor, Amit Pal Singh Kohli +2

Small vibrations observed in video can unveil information beyond what is visual, such as sound and material properties. It is possible to passively record these vibrations when the…

q-bio.NC2025

Inferring response times of perceptual decisions with Poisson variational autoencoders

Hayden R. Johnson, Anastasia N. Krouglova, Hadi Vafaii +2

Many properties of perceptual decision making are well-modeled by deep neural networks. However, such architectures typically treat decisions as instantaneous readouts, overlooking…

cs.AI2025

Brain-like Variational Inference

Hadi Vafaii, Dekel Galor, Jacob L. Yates

Inference in both brains and machines can be formalized by optimizing a shared objective: maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in machine learning, or minimizing variational…

cs.LG2024

Poisson Variational Autoencoder

Hadi Vafaii, Dekel Galor, Jacob L. Yates

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) employ Bayesian inference to interpret sensory inputs, mirroring processes that occur in primate vision across both ventral (Higgins et al., 2021) a…