
Faculty at @mpi_sws_ working at the intersection of ML, NLP, and cognitive neuroscience. Yogurt snob.
Saarbrücken, Germany
Joined January 2019
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So excited and honored to receive an ERC Starting Grant for the project BrainAlign!! BrainAlign will bring LLMs closer to human understanding by directly aligning them with the human brain.
Stay tuned for our findings, and multiple postdoc and PhD openings in the coming years!
Mariya Toneva retweeted
I will be hiring phd students to work on the economics of generative AI, counterfactuals in ML, and human-ai collaboration through @ELLISforEurope and the MP-AIX program. Please, spread the word. Happy to chat in person at NeurIPS in Paris or via [email protected] (1/n)
Mariya Toneva retweeted
Very happy to announce that RABBiT has been accepted at @NeurIPSConf, excited to present it at Sydney this year 🎉!
We are also presenting this work at @SNLmtg tomorrow. If you are in Geneva, please drop by poster E58 at the 11am session tomorrow or feel free to reach out anytime!
Looking forward to the feedback and discussions :")!
🚨 Super excited to share our latest work:
RABBiT: a foundation model for speech- and language-evoked brain activity.** 🧠🎧
W/ @mtoneva1
One model enables:
✅ accurate zero-shot brain prediction
✅ efficient few-shot adaptation with only 5-10 mins of subject data
✅ convenient in silico neuroscience experiments
and it’s so lightweight that it enables real-time, in-browser inference (feel free to try for yourself!)
Website: bridge-ai-neuro.github.io/ra…
Here's the story. 🧵👇
Mariya Toneva retweeted
i was diagnosed with thyroid cancer many years ago purely by chance, because i had to get blood work for my US green card application (thank you, USCIS!). i was in my mid-30’s and was reasonably healthy (or so i believed.) this was shocking and totally unpredictable news to me. thanks to the amazing team of clinicians at NYU Langone, i successfully went through a total thyroidectomy followed by radioactive iodine therapy. but, it was truly the most uncertain and confusing period of my life.
this is when i first realized that no one can opt out of healthcare. being sick isn’t what you choose to or choose not to. it is something that unpredictably happens to all of us at some point for one reason or another. this is why it is a healthcare system that we collectively build and use to support each other at the society level. because it must support everyone, the complexity of creating, maintaining and improving this system is a Herculean effort that calls for all the help in the world.
today, i am announcing @OrtetAI together with my dear co-founders, @keunwoochoi, @HenriDwyer, @elmanmansimov, @causalclaudia and Jeff, to lend our support to improving the health of each and every one of us. Ortet’s goal is to create a technological foundation that will enable health systems to deliver predictably better care to each and every patient. this will only be possible by working closely with all stakeholders in the broader ecosystem, which is enabled in part by Ortet’s close partnership with Thoreau.
Ortet is taking the very first step of a long journey ahead, and at the end of this journey, i strongly believe we would be able to say that Ortet had contributed to building better, more predictable healthcare and thus to improving health of each and every one of us.
see ortet.ai/ for more!
So proud of this effort! Give RABBiT a try for your language fMRI data 🐰
Foundation models in cog neuro still have to prove their utility but the potential to bridge data across tasks, imaging modalities, and systems & cell neuro is really exciting.
The future is bright ☀️
🚨 Super excited to share our latest work:
RABBiT: a foundation model for speech- and language-evoked brain activity.** 🧠🎧
W/ @mtoneva1
One model enables:
✅ accurate zero-shot brain prediction
✅ efficient few-shot adaptation with only 5-10 mins of subject data
✅ convenient in silico neuroscience experiments
and it’s so lightweight that it enables real-time, in-browser inference (feel free to try for yourself!)
Website: bridge-ai-neuro.github.io/ra…
Here's the story. 🧵👇
🚨 Two open postdoc positions in the ERC-funded project BrainAlign at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbruecken, Germany:
position #1 on NeuroAI: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/5…
position #2 on human-centered LLM evaluations: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/5…
Application deadline: Oct 13, 2026
Mariya Toneva retweeted
📢I am hiring interns at the Max Planck Institute!
Topics of interest:
(1) LLM factuality, reliable information synthesis and reasoning (esp. in agentic settings), personalization
(2) AI creativity
(3) Data-centric interpretability
Apply here by Sep 15: shorturl.at/RmSb1
Really eye-opening to survey NeuroAI work across both vision and language--many questions have been answered in one field but remain open in the other!
See 🦋 for a fun fact about the origin story..
1/5 Over a decade of comparing deep neural networks to the human brain—but what have we actually learned? Our new @TrendsCognSci Feature Review synthesizes a decade of brain–DNN comparisons, asking what they reveal about brain function across vision and language.
Mariya Toneva retweeted
Congratulations to John Hale for the ACL test of time award at #acl2026nlp! Well deserved!
Mariya Toneva retweeted
Way to kick off #ICML2026! Our work got featured in the @guardian. We show how AI tools on social networks can shape collective opinion on politically charged topics. Find me at @taig_icml and the AI4GOOD workshops to learn more (or keep reading 🧵)
📰 shorturl.at/IarKw
Mariya Toneva retweeted
I will be at #ICML2026 🇰🇷 presenting three papers on interpretability and model adaptation. Feel free to reach out if you want to chat! 🙂
P.S. I'm looking for motivated students to join my new group at Saarland University 🇩🇪: mariusmosbach.com/group/
Mariya Toneva retweeted
Yes, there are still a few moving pieces, but the #SNL2026 program is almost locked in! And it’s already 100% worth securing your spot, booking your accommodation, and planning your trip👇🏼
6 poster sessions, 3 slide sessions, 3 keynotes, 2 symposia, 2 educational courses, 1 panel discussion: something for all tastes at #SNL2026! Don't miss out - secure your spot before the early registration deadline: 2026.neurolang.org/meeting-r…
It was a lot of fun to write this piece! Makes me so excited for the symposium about The Modern Neuroscience Lab in the Age of AI at FENS in a little more than 2 weeks 🧠🤖
These models were not built to explain the brain. But treating them as model organisms that we can perturb and evolve will move us closer to truly understanding the brain’s mechanics, writes @mtoneva1.
thetransmitter.org/artificia…
Mariya Toneva retweeted
Our NeuroAI study made it onto the cover of Nature Machine Intelligence (@NatMachIntell) ❤️.
In it, we demonstrate that a developmentally-inspired visual diet can drastically improve the robustness of ANN-based vision systems.
open access, open code, open weights, open science
Mariya Toneva retweeted
How can generative AI better support human creativity, without limiting it?
If you have thoughts, we invite submissions to our ICML workshop on Generative AI, Creativity, and Human-AI Co-Creation (@creativeai_ws)
📍 July 2026, Seoul
📄 Submit by: April 24 (AOE)
⏬ (1/2)
Mariya Toneva retweeted
Today NeurIPS is announcing our official satellite event in Paris.
After responding to the call from Ellis following the success of EurIPS in December, we are pleased to reach a new milestone by joining forces with the NeurIPS organizing committee for the 2026 edition!
Following the success of the EurIPS and NeurIPS-Mexico City pilots in 2025, we are thrilled to announce two official NeurIPS 2026 satellite events for this year!
These will be held in Paris, France and Atlanta, USA, respectively, running alongside the main venue in Sydney, Australia.
Both satellite events will feature keynotes, oral and poster presentations of accepted NeurIPS 2026 papers, as well as workshops. We are planning tutorials, affinity events, and other elements for the satellite sites and we'll share more information as planning advances.
Wherever you choose to join us, the entire NeurIPS organizing committee is working hard to deliver an outstanding experience for the whole community!
neurips.cc/
Mariya Toneva retweeted
Big job update: Next week I start as a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholingustics, @MPI_NL 🧠
Building the Language and Predictive Computation group -- using LLMs to model language in the mind/brain, and vice versa.
Hiring soon!
Mariya Toneva retweeted
📢 I'm recruiting PhD students at MPI!!
Topics include:
1⃣ LLM factuality, reliable info synthesis and reasoning, personalization + applications in real-world inc. education, science
2⃣ Data-centric interpretability
3⃣Creativity in AI, esp scientific applications 🧵1/2
Very nice work from Michela! It was very interesting to see how different the set of important stimulus words are for brain alignment vs next word prediction.
We are excited to share our preprint presenting the first input attribution approach to investigate brain-LLM alignment: “Fine-Grained Analysis of Brain–LLM Alignment through Input Attribution” 🧠📚 with @webrot and @mtoneva1.
📄 Read the full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.12355
🧵
Mariya Toneva retweeted
🧵🎉 Our mega-paper is finally published in TMLR! We're "Getting Aligned on Representational Alignment" - the degree to which internal representations of different (biological & artificial) information processing systems agree. 🧠🤖🔬🔍 #CognitiveScience #Neuroscience #AI




























