Pinyuan Feng
Hi! I am currently a PhD student at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, working with Prof. Niko Kriegeskorte. My research aims to translate insights from cognitive science and neuroscience into advances in AI, and to use AI as a tool for deepening our understanding of human intelligence.
Previously, I completed my Master of Science in Computer Science at Brown University and my Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Nottingham. I also spent a wonderful year as a Machine Learning Engineer Intern at NIO Inc.
I had the privilege of working with Prof. Thomas Serre and Prof. Drew Linsley at Brown, Prof. Steve Benford and Prof. Eugene Ch'ng at Nottingham, as well as Prof. Ching-Yao Chan and Dr. Yu-Ke Li at Berkeley DeepDrive.
2025
Paper Better AI ≠ Better Bio Model was accepted by Trends in Cognitive Sciences.Presented Interpretable Visual Decoding at NeurIPS 2025 BrainBodyFM Workshop.
Paper Adversarial Alignment was accepted by ICLR 2025 Re-Align Workshop.
2024
Started my PhD at Columbia University.2022
Started my MS at Brown University.2021
Started my internship at NIO Inc.Graduated with First Class Honours and received the High Achievers Award.
. . .
- multimodal brain encoding and decoding
- human-inspired self-supervised representation learning
- representational similarity analysis between humans and machines
For a more up-to-date list of my work, please visit my Google Scholar.
Towards Interpretable Visual Decoding with Attention to Brain Representations
Pinyuan Feng*, Hossein Adeli, Wenxuan Guo, Fan Cheng, Ethan Hwang, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026
OpenReview •
arXiv •
Webpage •
Code
Better Artificial Intelligence Does Not Mean Better Models of Biology
Drew Linsley*, Pinyuan Feng, Thomas Serre
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2026
Cell
Press •
arXiv •
Video •
Code
I am a member of GrowAI community with a shared interest in growing AI to learn like a child.
I am a member of Neurotech X Columbia to advancing neurotechnology and AI.
I have served as a reviewer for CVPR MMRAgI 2026, ICLR Re-Align 2026, ICLR ES-Reasoning 2026, CCN 2025, and CCN 2024