Research Interests

Computational/ theoretical neuroscience, machine intelligence. Frameworks and representations for understanding the world.

Publications, Preprints

2024

"A tale of two algorithms: Structured slots explain prefrontal sequence memory and are unified with hippocampal cognitive mapsA Cellular Basis for Mapping Behavioural Structure" [paper]

JCR Whittington, W Dorrell, TEJ Behrens, S Ganguli, M El-Gaby

Neuron, 2024

"A Cellular Basis for Mapping Behavioural Structure" [paper]

M El-Gaby, AL Harris, JCR Whittington, W Dorrell, A Bhomick, MW Walton, T Akam, TEJ Behrens

Nature, 2024

"The Zamba2 Suite: Technical Report" [paper]

P Glorioso, Q Anthony, Y Tokpanov, A Golubeva, V Shyam, JCR Whittington, J Pilault, B Millidge

arxiv, 2024

"Don't Cut Corners: Exact Conditions for Modularity in Biologically Inspired Representations" [paper]

W Dorrell, K Hsu, L Hollingsworth, JH Lee, J Wu, C Finn, PE Latham, TEJ Behrens, JCR Whittington

arXiv, 2024

"Zyda: A 1.3 T Dataset for Open Language Modeling"

Y Tokpanov, B Millidge, P Glorioso, J Pilault, A Ibrahim, JCR Whittington, Q Anthony

arXiv, 2024

"Zamba: A Compact 7B SSM Hybrid Model"

P Glorioso, Q Anthony, Y Tokpanov, JCR Whittington, J Pilault, A Ibrahim, B Millidge

arXiv, 2024

2023

"On prefrontal working memory and hippocampal episodic memory: Unifying memories stored in weights and activation slots" [paper]

JCR Whittington, W Dorrell, TEJ Behrens, S Ganguli, M El-Gaby

bioRxiv, 2023

"Disentanglement with Biological Constraints: A Theory of Functional Cell Types"  [paper] 

JCR Whittington, W Dorrell, S Ganguli, TEJ Behrens

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023. (Oral & Outstanding Paper Award honourable mention)

"Actionable Neural Representations: Grid Cells from Minimal Constraints"  [paper] 

W Dorrell, PE Latham, TEJ Behrens, JCR Whittington

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023

"Constructing future behaviour in the hippocampal formation through composition and replay" [paper]

JJW Bakermans,  J Warren,  JCR Whittington*, TEJ Behrens*

bioRxiv, 2023

"Disentanglement via latent quantization" [paper]

K Hsu, W Dorrell, JCR Whittington, J Wu, C Finn

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023

2022

"How to build a cognitive map: insights from models of the hippocampal formation" [paper] [preprint] [code]

JCR Whittington, D McCaffary, JJW Bakermans, TEJ Behrens

Nature Neurosciene, 2022

"Relating transformers to models and neural representations of the hippocampal formation" [paper]

JCR Whittington, J Warren, TEJ Behrens

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022

"Reinforcement learning: Dopamine ramps with fuzzy value estimates" [paper]

JCR Whittington, TEJ Behrens

Current Biology, 2022

2021

"Constellation: Learning relational abstractions over objects for compositional imagination" [paper]

JCR Whittington, R Kabra, L Matthey, CP Burgess, A Lerchner

arXiv, 2021

2020

"The Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine: Unifying space and relational memory through generalisation in the hippocampal formation" [paper] [preprint] [code]

JCR Whittington, TH Muller, S Mark, G Chen, C Barry, N Burgess, TEJ Behrens

Cell, 2020

2019

"Theories of error back-propagation in the brain" [paper]

JCR Whittington, R Bogacz

Trends in cognitive sciences, 2019

2018

"What is a cognitive map? Organising knowledge for flexible behaviour" [paper]

TEJ Behrens, TH Muller, JCR Whittington, S Mark, AB Baram, KL Stachenfeld, Z Kurth-Nelson

Neuron, 2018

"Generalisation of structural knowledge in the hippocampal-entorhinal system" [paper] [code]

JCR Whittington, TH Muller, S Mark, C Barry, TEJ Behrens

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2018. (Oral)

"Intuitive planning: global navigation through cognitive maps based on grid-like codes" [paper]

AB Baram, TH Muller, JCR Whittington, TEJ Behrens

bioRxiv, 2018

2017

"An approximation of the error backpropagation algorithm in a predictive coding network with local hebbian synaptic plasticity" [paper, code]

JCR Whittington, R Bogacz

Neural computation, 2017