Singapore

The mapping from sound to neural activity that underlies hearing is highly non-linear. The first few stages of this mapping in the cochlea have been modelled successfully, initially with biophysical models built by hand and, more recently, with DNN models trained on datasets simulated by the biophysical models. Modelling the auditory brain has been a challenge because central auditory processing is too complex for models to be built by hand, and datasets for training DNN models directly have not been available. Recent work has taken advantage of large-scale high resolution neural recordings from the auditory midbrain to build a DNN model of normal hearing with great success. But this model assumes that auditory processing is the same in all brains, and therefore it cannot capture the widely varying effects of hearing loss. 

We propose a novel variational-conditional model to learn to encode the space of hearing loss directly from recordings of neural activity in the auditory midbrain of healthy and noise exposed animals. With hearing loss parametrised by only 6 free parameters per animal, our model accurately predicts 62\% of the explainable variance in neural responses from normal hearing animals and 68\% for hearing impaired animals, comparable to state of the art animal specific models. We demonstrate that the model can be used to simulate realistic activity from out of sample animals by fitting only the learned conditioning parameters with Bayesian optimisation, achieving crossentropy loss within 2\% of the optimum in 15-30 iterations. Including more animals in the training data slightly improved the performance on unseen animals. This model will enable future development of parametrised hearing loss compensation models trained to directly restore normal neural coding in hearing impaired brains, which can be quickly fitted for a new user by human in the loop optimisation.

AAAI 2026

Modelling the Effects of Hearing Loss on Neural Coding in the Auditory Midbrain with Variational Conditioning

deep generative models and autoencoders

neural spike coding

neuroscience

deep learning

Colleagues and Friends:

I am very happy to welcome you to the 14th annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, and to the first virtual edition of our meeting. I want to highlight the important work the CAN meeting chair, **Roger Thompson** and co-chair, **Alyson Fournier**, did to put together the great program we are offering this year. Moving to a virtual format required a complete re-design of the program, and both Roger and Alyson did a splendid job in providing us with an appealing and well adapted program for our first virtual event. I wish to thank them for this very important effort.

Highlights of this year’s scientific meeting include invited speakers **Michael Hausser, Franck Polleux, Gwyneth Card, Magdalena Götz**and Brain Prize winner **Huda Zoghbi**. Plenary and parallel symposia, proposed by our members complete our diverse [scientific program.](https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/program-2021/)

The 2021 Advocacy session, chaired and organized by CAN advocacy committee chair **Karun Singh**, will feature a special lecture and question period with Member of Parliament and past Science Minister **Kirsty Duncan**. This will be followed by a short overview of CAN’s advocacy activities over the last year. We invite you to participate in this session for insight from Dr. Duncan on the workings of Parliament Hill, and to learn more about what CAN has been doing to promote neuroscience research in Canada.

We are also excited to host **Lisa Willis** in the Equity Diversity and Inclusion session, organized by EDI committee chair **Jibran Khokhar**.

A special highlight of our meeting will be the lectures by award-winning young neuroscientists. We are please to host the CAN 2020 Young Investigator Award winner **Mihaela Iordanova**, and CAN 2021 Young Investigator Award winners **Aaron Phillips** and **Tabrez Siddiqui**. Highlights will also include presentation by the top three winners of the CAN-CIHR-INMHA Brain Star Award winners, **Claire Gizowski, Nuria Daviu Abant** and **Lukas Tamayo-Orrego**.

Independently organized satellite symposia complement and complete this exciting program, check them out here: https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/2021-satellite-symposia/

Some of the most engaging sessions are always the poster sessions featuring the work of our trainees, so make sure to log in to Gather Town during the poster sessions to chat with the presenters.
We hope you enjoy this program, and look forward to welcoming you, virtually.

Shernaz Bamji

President of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience

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Please head to https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/registration-2021/ to register. 

CAN-ACN 2021

14th Canadian Neuroscience Meeting from August 23rd-25th

poster

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The surface pressure field of transportation systems, including cars, trains, and aircraft, is critical for aerodynamic analysis and design. In recent years, deep neural networks have emerged as promising and efficient methods for modeling surface pressure field, being alternatives to computationally expensive CFD simulations. Currently, large-scale public datasets are available for domains such as automotive aerodynamics. However, in many specialized areas, such as high-speed trains, data scarcity remains a fundamental challenge in aerodynamic modeling, severely limiting the effectiveness of standard neural network approaches. To address this limitation, we propose the Adaptive Field Learning Framework (AdaField), which pre-trains the model on public large-scale datasets to improve generalization in sub-domains with limited data. AdaField comprises two key components. First, we design the Semantic Aggregation Point Transformer (SAPT) as a high-performance backbone that efficiently handles large-scale point clouds for surface pressure prediction. Second, regarding the substantial differences in flow conditions and geometric scales across different aerodynamic subdomains, we propose Flow-Conditioned Adapter (FCA) and Physics-Informed Data Augmentation (PIDA). FCA enables the model to flexibly adapt to different flow conditions with a small set of trainable parameters, while PIDA expands the training data distribution to better cover variations in object scale and velocity. Our experiments show that AdaField achieves SOTA performance on the DrivAerNet++ dataset and can be effectively transferred to train and aircraft scenarios with minimal fine-tuning. These results highlight AdaField’s potential as a generalizable and transferable solution for surface pressure field modeling, supporting efficient aerodynamic design across a wide range of transportation systems.

AdaField: Generalizable Surface Pressure Modeling with Physics-Informed Pre-training and Flow-Conditioned Adaptation

3D Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLFMs) have shown strong generalization and zero-shot recognition capabilities in open-world point cloud processing tasks. However, these models often underperform in practical scenarios where data are noisy, incomplete, or drawn from a different distribution than the training data.
To address this, we propose \textbf{Uni-Adapter}, a novel training-free online test-time adaptation (TTA) strategy for 3D VLFMs based on dynamic prototype learning. We define a 3D cache to store class-specific cluster centers as prototypes, which are continuously updated to capture intra-class variability in heterogeneous data distributions. These dynamic prototypes serve as anchors for cache-based logit computation via similarity scoring. Simultaneously, a graph-based label smoothing module captures inter-prototype similarities to enforce label consistency among similar prototypes. Finally, we unify predictions from the original 3D VLFM and the refined 3D cache using entropy-weighted aggregation for reliable adaptation. Without retraining, Uni-Adapter effectively mitigates distribution shifts, achieving state-of-the-art performance on diverse 3D benchmarks over different 3D VLFMs—improving ModelNet-40C by \textbf{10.55\%}, ScanObjectNN-C by \textbf{8.26\%}, and ShapeNet-C by \textbf{4.49\%} over the source 3D VLFMs.

Adapt-As-You-Walk Through the Clouds: Training-Free Online Test-Time Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Foundation Models

For a class of hybrid dynamical systems, we show that a re- current neural network with hybrid dynamics, which we refer to as a hybrid dynamic recurrent neural network (HyRNN), can be constructed to approximate solutions to hybrid sys- tems over bounded (hybrid) time horizons. Specifically, given a desired precision level, we show that a hybrid system with dynamics resembling those of recurrent neural networks for continuous-time and discrete-time systems can be designed so that, for each bounded hybrid time horizon, its solutions are close to the solutions to the given hybrid system. Through the use of universal approximation theorems, we show that the approximation result holds for traditional smooth activa- tion functions, such as sigmoid and arctan, and that exten- sions to ReLU functions are possible, and characterize the complexity of the proposed HyRNN.

HyRNN: Hybrid Recurrent Neural Networks for Approximating Hybrid Dynamical Systems

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown advanced performance in vision-language tasks. However, existing multimodal reasoning models often suffer from excessive reasoning steps, leading to high computational costs and inefficiency. In this paper, we propose the Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning Model (MARS), which enables adaptive adjustment of the reasoning strategy based on question difficulty. Specifically, MARS adopts a three-stage training framework based on our constructed training dataset (MART): 1) CoT Masking Learning to enhance reasoning logicality by predicting masked reasoning steps. 2) Adaptive Reasoning Instruction Learning to train the model to skip or keep reasoning steps according to difficulty levels. 3) CoT Lightweight Reinforcement Learning with the Information Bottleneck Principle based GRPO algorithm to reduce CoT length while maintaining performance and generalizability. Results on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets show that MARS significantly reduces the CoT length (90.2% decrease) while improving accuracy (0.54%), outperforming existing SOTA open-source and proprietary MLLMs.

MARS: Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning Model for Avoiding Overthinking

We introduce **LLaMMo** (**L**arge **La**nguage and **M**ulti-Person **Mo**tion Assistant), the first instruction-tuning multimodal framework tailored for multi-human motion analysis. LLaMMo incorporates a novel human-centric and social-temporal learner that models and fuses both intra-person dynamics and inter-person dependencies, yielding robust, context-aware representations of complex group behaviors while maintaining low computational overhead. To support LLaMMo, we construct **LLaVerse**, a large-scale dataset with fine-grained manual annotations covering diverse multi-person activities spanning daily social interaction and professional team sports. Built on top of LLaVerse, we also propose **LLaMI-Bench**, a dedicated benchmark for evaluating multi-human behavior understanding across motion and video modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLaMMo consistently outperforms baselines in understanding multi-person interactions under low-latency settings, with notable gains in both social and sport-specific contexts.

Multiple Human Motion Understanding

Predicting pedestrian motion trajectories is critical for the path planning and motion control of autonomous vehicles. Recent diffusion-based models have shown promising results in capturing the inherent stochasticity of pedestrian behavior for trajectory prediction. However, the absence of explicit semantic modelling of pedestrian intent in many diffusion-based methods may result in misinterpreted behaviors and reduced prediction accuracy. To address the above challenges, we propose a diffusion-based pedestrian trajectory prediction framework that incorporates both short-term and long-term motion intentions. Short-term intent is modelled using a residual polar representation, which decouples direction and magnitude to capture fine-grained local motion patterns. Long-term intent is estimated through a learnable, token-based endpoint predictor that generates multiple candidate goals with associated probabilities, enabling multimodal and context-aware intention modelling. Furthermore, we enhance the diffusion process by incorporating adaptive guidance and a residual noise predictor that dynamically refines denoising accuracy. The proposed framework is evaluated on the widely used ETH, UCY, and SDD benchmarks, demonstrating competitive results against state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IAD/.

Intention-Aware Diffusion Model for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Multi-Domain Multi-Task (MDMT) recommendation aims to provide personalized recommendations by leveraging information across multiple domains and tasks. However, existing methods often suffer from spurious correlations between irrelevant features and the target, leading to negative transfer. To address this, we propose a Stable and Adaptive Fusion (SAF) framework for MDMT recommendation. SAF introduces a weighted Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) loss to decorrelate irrelevant features from the target, learning sample weights that promote stable (i.e., robust to spurious correlations) representations in both bottom and expert layers. We employ Random Fourier Features (RFF) to enable scalable computation of the HSIC loss. We further employ adaptive feature and expert gating to select these stable features, enabling the model to capture intricate cross-domain and cross-task dependencies. The learned sample weights are also used to reweight the MDMT loss during training. Experiments on large-scale datasets show that SAF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 2\% in AUC. To facilitate further research, we release a new industrial dataset with 30 million interactions across 3 domains and 2 tasks, with 300 features.

Stable and Adaptive Fusion for Multi-domain Multi-task Recommendation

As valuable digital assets, deep neural networks necessitate robust ownership protection, positioning neural network watermarking (NNW) as a promising solution. 
Among various NNW approaches, weight-based methods are favored for their simplicity and practicality; however, they remain generally vulnerable to forging and overwriting attacks.
To address those challenges, we propose *NeuralMark*, a robust method built around a *hashed watermark filter*. 
Specifically, we utilize a hash function to generate an irreversible binary watermark from a secret key, which is then used as a filter to select the model parameters for embedding. 
This design cleverly intertwines the embedding parameters with the hashed watermark, providing a robust defense against both forging and overwriting attacks.
Average pooling is also incorporated to resist fine-tuning and pruning attacks.
Furthermore, it can be seamlessly integrated into various neural network architectures, ensuring broad applicability.
We theoretically analyze its security boundary and highlight the necessity of using a hashed watermark as a filtering mechanism.
Empirically, we demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness across 13 distinct Convolutional and Transformer architectures, covering five image classification tasks and one text generation task.

Hashed Watermark as a Filter: A Unified Defense Against Forging and Overwriting Attacks in Neural Network Watermarking

Visual Dialogue Navigation (VDN) aims to enable agents to reach target locations through dialogue with humans. The integration of VDN into Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems enhances human-machine interaction by enabling intuitive, hands-free operation, thereby unlocking vast applications. However, existing VDN models for UAVs can only perform navigation based on dialogue history, lacking proactive interaction capabilities to correct trajectories. Moreover, their sequential observation history recording mechanism struggles to accurately localize landmarks observed in the historical context, leading to ineffective utilization of referential information in new user instructions.
To address these, we present AerialVLA, an end-to-end UAV navigation framework integrating dialogue comprehension, action decision-making, and navigational question generation. AerialVLA comprises three core components: i) we propose the Progress-Driven Navigation-Query Alternation mechanism to determine optimal questioning timing through navigation progress estimation autonomously. ii) To effectively model long-horizon history observation sequences, we develop the History Spatial-Temporal Fusion module that extracts discriminative spatial-temporal representations from historical observations. iii) Furthermore, to overcome data scarcity in training, we devise the Online Task-Driven Augmentation strategy that enhances learning through action-conditioned data augmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that AerialVLA achieves state-of-the-art navigation performance while exhibiting effective dialogue capabilities.
Moreover, to better evaluate the agent's proactive dialogue and navigation abilities, our evaluation benchmark, named UAV Navigation with Online Dialogue (UNOD), incorporates an online dialogue interaction module. The UNOD assesses UAV agents' real-time questioning capabilities by leveraging an Air Commander Large Language Model to simulate human-UAV interactions during testing. Our code will be released.

AerialVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Aerial Navigation with Online Dialogue

Recently, multi-modal embedding methods have flourished in entity alignment. As state-of-the-art approaches evolve rapidly, visual modality (i.e., images) missing emerges as a critical challenge. While visual modality typically offers the most informative signals in multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA), it is frequently unavailable for many entities. The existing methods commonly use dummy vectors to represent visual-missing embeddings, which negatively impacts both model training and inference. In this paper, we propose robust multi-modal entity alignment (rMMEA), which leverages ranking-based knowledge distillation and mutual information (MI) estimation to address missing modalities while enhancing noise robustness. Unlike conventional teacher-student distillation that requires the student to replicate teacher outputs, our rMMEA learns soft rankings from pure and complete modality sides while capturing implicit key semantics of teacher embeddings through mutual information maximization, allowing rMMEA to avoid strict point-to-point alignment. The experimental results across multiple benchmarks and settings demonstrate that rMMEA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art anti-modality-missing methods in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

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AdaField: Generalizable Surface Pressure Modeling with Physics-Informed Pre-training and Flow-Conditioned Adaptation

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