ArticleNature neuroscience2024
Natural language instructions induce compositional generalization in networks of neurons.
Article in Nature neuroscience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- The compositionality continuum as a principle for studying the neural basis of intelligence.Nature neuroscience · 2026Review
- Brain-AI convergence: Generative world models and hierarchical attention for human intelligence.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Review
- Data-driven reduced modeling of neural dynamics.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Sparse component analysis: A method that uncovers separable computations within neural population activity.Neuron · 2026Article
- Human hippocampal ripples coordinate planning sequences and compositional representations in neocortex.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Sex-specific behavioral feedback modulates sensorimotor processing and drives flexible social behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
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- Orthogonal-Rotational Dynamics Supports Efficient Encoding and Updating for Streaming Information in Working Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural representation of action symbols in primate frontal cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Motor cortex flexibly deploys a high-dimensional repertoire of subskills.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Novel Verbal Instructions Recruit Abstract Neural Patterns of Time-Variable Information Dimensionality.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neuron signal attenuation activation mechanism for deep learning.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- What does my network learn? Assessing interpretability of deep learning for EEG.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- A cellular basis for mapping behavioural structure.Nature · 2024Article
- Flexible multitask computation in recurrent networks utilizes shared dynamical motifs.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A fundamental human cognitive feat is to interpret linguistic instructions in order to perform novel tasks without explicit task experience. Yet, the neural computations that might be used to accomplish this remain poorly understood. We use advances in natural language processing to create a neural model of generalization based on linguistic instructions. Models are trained on a set of common psychophysical tasks, and receive instructions embedded by a pretrained language model. Our best models can perform a previously unseen task with an average performance of 83% correct based solely on linguistic instructions (that is, zero-shot learning). We found that language scaffolds sensorimotor representations such that activity for interrelated tasks shares a common geometry with the semantic representations of instructions, allowing language to cue the proper composition of practiced skills in unseen settings. We show how this model generates a linguistic description of a novel task it has identified using only motor feedback, which can subsequently guide a partner model to perform the task. Our models offer several experimentally testable predictions outlining how linguistic information must be represented to facilitate flexible and general cognition in the human brain.
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