Jacob Zavatone-Veth

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

• [June 2022] Our paper on generalization in deep linear Bayesian neural networks and random feature models was just published in PRE.

• [May 2022] Our note on connections between neural network kernels and pattern storage capacity was just published in Neural Computation.

• [February 2022] Our review on locomotor kinematics in mice and flies (with Ana Gonçalves, Megan Carey, and Damon Clark) was just published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

• [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

• Population geometry enables fast sampling in spiking neural networks
  Masset, P.*, Zavatone-Veth, J. A.*, Connor, J. P., Murthy, V. N.^#, and Pehlevan, C.^# (*,^#equal contributions)
  [bioRxiv]

• 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

• Contrasting random and learned features in deep Bayesian linear regression
  Zavatone-Veth, J. A., Tong, W. L., and Pehlevan, C.
  Physical Review E 105 (6): 064118. (2022)
  [link] [arXiv]

• On neural network kernels and the storage capacity problem
  Zavatone-Veth, J. A., and Pehlevan, C.
  Neural Computation 34 (5): 1136–1142. (2022)
  [link] [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 73: 102516. (2022)
  [link] [arXiv]

• Drifting neuronal representations: Bug or feature?
  Masset, P.*, Qin, S.*, and Zavatone-Veth, J. A.* (*equal contributions)
  Biological Cybernetics 116: 253-266. (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)
  [link] [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
  Received Certificate of Distinction in Teaching

• Teaching fellow, Harvard GenEd 1125: Artificial & Natural Intelligence (Spring 2021)
  Lead instructor: Venkatesh Murthy
  Received Certificate of Distinction in Teaching

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