Jacob Zavatone-Veth | Harvard University

About Me

I am a PhD candidate in physics at Harvard, where I am fortunate to be advised by Cengiz Pehlevan. I did my undergraduate work in physics at Yale, where I worked with Damon Clark on visual motion detection and locomotor coordination in fruit flies.

My research interests lie in some neighborhood of the intersection between theoretical neuroscience, statistical physics, and machine learning. This website—though very much a work in progress—describes some of my past and current projects.

I can also be found on Twitter or ResearchGate. My ORCID is 0000-0002-4060-1738.

News

[January 2022] Our review on representational drift (with Paul Masset and Shanshan Qin) was just published in Biological Cybernetics.
[September 2021] Our papers on representation learning and function-space prior distributions in Bayesian neural networks were accepted to NeurIPS 2021.

Publications

Preprints

Manipulating neural dynamics to tune motion detection
Gonzalez-Suarez, A. D., Zavatone-Veth, J. A., Chen, J., Matulis, C., Badwan, B. A., and Clark, D. A.
[bioRxiv]

Articles

2022

On neural network kernels and the storage capacity problem
Zavatone-Veth, J. A., and Pehlevan, C.
Neural Computation, in press. (2022)
[arXiv]
Parallel locomotor control strategies in mice and flies
Gonçalves, A. I.*, Zavatone-Veth, J. A.*, Carey, M. R.^#, and Clark, D. A.^# (*,^#equal contributions)
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, in press. (2022)
[arXiv]
Drifting neuronal representations: Bug or feature?
Masset, P.*, Qin, S.*, and Zavatone-Veth, J. A.* (*equal contributions)
Biological Cybernetics. (2022)
[link]

2021

Depth induces scale-averaging in overparameterized linear Bayesian neural networks
Zavatone-Veth, J. A., and Pehlevan, C.
55th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers. (2021)
[arXiv]
Asymptotics of representation learning in finite Bayesian neural networks
Zavatone-Veth, J. A., Canatar, A., Ruben, B. S., and Pehlevan, C.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 34. (2021)
[link] [OpenReview] [arXiv] [code]
Exact marginal prior distributions of finite Bayesian neural networks
Zavatone-Veth, J. A., and Pehlevan, C.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 34 (Spotlight). (2021)
[link] [OpenReview] [arXiv] [code]
Activation function dependence of the storage capacity of treelike neural networks
Zavatone-Veth, J. A., and Pehlevan, C.
Physical Review E (Letter) 103 (2): L020301. (2021)
[link] [arXiv]

2020

Statistical structure of the trial-to-trial timing variability in synfire chains
Obeid, D., Zavatone-Veth, J. A., and Pehlevan, C.
Physical Review E 102 (5): 052406. (2020)
[link] [bioRxiv]
Spatiotemporally precise optogenetic activation of sensory neurons in freely walking Drosophila
DeAngelis, B. D.*, Zavatone-Veth, J. A.*, Gonzalez-Suarez, A. D., and Clark, D. A. (*equal contributions)
eLife 9: e54183. (2020)
[link] [code]
A minimal synaptic model for direction selective neurons in Drosophila
Zavatone-Veth, J. A., Badwan, B. A., and Clark, D. A.
Journal of Vision 20 (2): 2. (2020)
[link] [bioRxiv] [code]

2019

Using slow frame rate imaging to extract fast receptive fields
Mano, O., Creamer, M. S., Matulis, C. A., Salazar-Gatzimas, E., Chen, J., Zavatone-Veth, J. A., and Clark, D. A.
Nature Communications 10: 4979. (2019)
[link] [code]
Dynamic nonlinearities enable direction opponency in Drosophila elementary motion detectors
Badwan, B. A., Creamer, M. S., Zavatone-Veth, J. A., and Clark, D. A.
Nature Neuroscience 22: 1318–1326. (2019)
[link] [code]
The manifold structure of limb coordination in walking Drosophila
DeAngelis, B. D.*, Zavatone-Veth, J. A.*, and Clark, D. A. (*equal contributions)
eLife 8: e46409. (2019)
[link] [erratum] [code]

Teaching

Teaching fellow, Harvard Applied Mathematics 226: Neural Computation (Fall 2021)
Lead instructor: Cengiz Pehlevan
Teaching fellow, Harvard GenEd 1125: Artificial & Natural Intelligence (Spring 2021)
Lead instructor: Venkatesh Murthy
Received Certificate of Distinction in Teaching