Foraging decisions and neural dynamics

Competitive integration of time and reward explains value-sensitive foraging decisions and frontal cortex ramping dynamics

How do animals decide when to stay on vs. leave a patch during foraging?

August 2025 · Michael Bukwich, Malcolm G. Campbell, David Zoltowski, Lyle Kingsbury, Momchil S. Tomov, Joshua Stern, HyungGoo R. Kim, Jan Drugowitsch, Scott W. Linderman, Naoshige Uchida
Neural evidence for strategy reuse

Neural evidence that humans reuse strategies to solve new tasks

How does the brain generalize previously useful strategies to novel tasks?

January 2025 · Sam Hall-McMaster, Momchil S. Tomov, Samuel J. Gershman, Nicolas W. Schuck
Explainable AI for self-driving cars

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

How can self-driving cars explain their decisions?

November 2024 · Eoin M. Kenny, Akshay Dharmavaram, Sang Uk Lee, Tung Phan-Minh, Shreyas Rajesh, Yunqing Hu, Laura Major, Momchil S. Tomov *, Julie A. Shah *
Lab2Car system architecture

Lab2Car: A Versatile Wrapper for Deploying Experimental Planners in Complex Real-world Environments

How can we safely deploy experimental motion planners at the early stages of development?

September 2024 · Marc Heim, Francisco Suarez-Ruiz, Ishraq Bhuiyan, Bruno Brito, Momchil S. Tomov
Inverse stochastic learning

Inverse stochastic learning

How can we infer what a subject has inferred at any moment based on their behavior?

August 2024 · Momchil S. Tomov
Predictive representations

Predictive Representations: Building Blocks of Intelligence

What is the successor representation? What is its role in biological and artificial intelligence?

January 2024 · Wilka Carvalho *, Momchil S. Tomov *, William de Cothi *, Caswell Barry, Samuel J. Gershman
DriveIRL system architecture

DriveIRL: Drive in Real Life with Inverse Reinforcement Learning

What is the intrinsic reward function of human drivers? How can we infer it and use it to drive an actual autonomous vehicle?

June 2023 · Tung Phan-Minh, Forbes Howington, Ting-Sheng Chu, Momchil S. Tomov, Robert E. Beaudoin, Sang Uk Lee, Nanxiang Li, Caglayan Dicle, Samuel Findler, Francisco Suarez-Ruiz, Bo Yang, Sammy Omari, Eric M. Wolff
Theory-based reinforcement learning neural architecture

The neural architecture of theory-based reinforcement learning

How does the brain build mental models of rich, dynamic domains, such as video games?

January 2023 · Momchil S. Tomov, Pedro Tsividis, Thomas Pouncy, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Samuel J. Gershman
CCNLab framework

CCNLab: A Benchmarking Framework for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience

How should we compare computational cognitive models in neuroscience?

December 2021 · Nikhil Xie Bhattasali, Momchil S. Tomov, Samuel J. Gershman
Corticostriatal learning

Causal Inference Gates Corticostriatal Learning

How do causal inferences shape reward-based learning in the brain?

August 2021 · Hayley M. Dorfman *, Momchil S. Tomov *, Bernice Cheung, Dennis Clarke, Samuel J. Gershman *, Brent L. Hughes *
Multi-task reinforcement learning

Multi-task reinforcement learning in humans

How do humans transfer knowledge across different tasks?

June 2021 · Momchil S. Tomov *, Eric Schulz *, Samuel J. Gershman
Neural correlates of uncertainty

Dissociable neural correlates of uncertainty underlie different exploration strategies

How does the brain represent different forms of uncertainty? How do those representations determine exploratory choices?

May 2020 · Momchil S. Tomov, Van Q. Truong, Rohan A. Hundia, Samuel J. Gershman
Hierarchical representations

Discovery of hierarchical representations for efficient planning

Why do humans represent their environments hierarchically? How are these hierarchical representations learned?

April 2020 · Momchil S. Tomov, Samyukta Yagati, Agni Kumar, Wanqian Yang, Samuel J. Gershman
Neural computations of causal learning

Neural Computations Underlying Causal Structure Learning

How does the brain learn the abstract causal structure of the world in a way that supports generalization?

August 2018 · Momchil S. Tomov, Hayley M. Dorfman, Samuel J. Gershman