Stanford & Oxford University & Zyphra
email: jcrwhittington at gmail dot com
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