Integrative neurocybernetic modeling in the era of large-scale neuroscience

Large-scale neuroscience is generating rich datasets across animals, brain areas and behavioral contexts, yet our modeling efforts remains fragmented across isolated experiments. We argue that understanding behavior requires integrative neurocybernetic models: understandable dynamical models that capture the closed-loop coupling of brain, body and environment, treat the brain as a controller pursuing latent objectives, represent structured variation across scales, and scale to heterogeneous datasets. Such models shift the goal from predicting neural recordings in isolation to inferring the organizing principles that govern neural and behavioral dynamics. We outline a practical route toward this goal by combining nonlinear state-space models and meta-dynamical extensions with scalable inference, knowledge distillation, mixed open- and closed-loop training, and connectomics-informed architectures. By pooling complementary constraints from recordings, behavior, perturbations and anatomy, integrative neurocybernetic models can provide statistical amplification, few-shot generalization, and mechanistic insight into shared dynamical structure, individual variation, and the control objectives that govern behavior. This agenda offers a model-centric path from fragmented data to a mechanistic science of how brains produce behavior.

Meta-Dynamical State Space Models for Integrative Neural Data Analysis

Learning shared structure across environments facilitates rapid learning and adaptive behavior in neural systems. This has been widely demonstrated and applied in machine learning to train models that are capable of generalizing to novel settings. However, there has been limited work exploiting the shared structure in neural activity during similar tasks for learning latent dynamics from neural recordings. Existing approaches are designed to infer dynamics from a single dataset and cannot be readily adapted to account for statistical heterogeneities across recordings. In this work, we hypothesize that similar tasks admit a corresponding family of related solutions and propose a novel approach for meta-learning this solution space from task-related neural activity of trained animals. Specifically, we capture the variabilities across recordings on a low-dimensional manifold which concisely parametrizes this family of dynamics, thereby facilitating rapid learning of latent dynamics given new recordings. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on few-shot reconstruction and forecasting of synthetic dynamical systems, and neural recordings from the motor cortex during different arm reaching tasks.