ANITI is delighted to invite you to an exceptional scientific seminar, held on the occasion of the visit to Toulouse of two internationally renowned researchers.
đź“… Thursday, July 17, 2026
đź•Ą Starting at 10:30 AM
📍 B612 — Room 6, Toulouse
🍽️ Followed by a lunch buffet
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Thomas Serre (Brown University & ANITI)
Scaling Laws vs. Neural Laws: Toward More Natural Artificial Vision
While large vision models now match human accuracy on benchmarks like ImageNet, their visual strategies diverge profoundly from those of the brain — and this divergence, strikingly, widens with scale. Thomas Serre will argue for an approach to artificial vision grounded in the neural laws of biological vision: developmental principles, cortical inductive biases, and learning from naturalistic video. Recent results from his lab show how this approach can pull deep networks toward markedly more human-like visual strategies, and how brain-inspired alternatives to transformer self-attention open promising new directions.
Ludovic Righetti (New York University & ANITI)
Learning Robotic Behaviors with Optimal Control and World-Models
How can planning and control algorithms operate directly in sensor space — vision, touch — rather than in abstract model-based representations? Ludovic Righetti will present his recent work on learning world-models and designing reinforcement learning algorithms tailored to multimodal sensory data, with concrete applications to legged locomotion and manipulation. The talk will also open onto a broader discussion on the societal impacts of robotics research and the responsibilities that engineers and researchers should embrace.
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Both talks speak directly to the core themes of ANITI: trustworthy artificial vision, learning-based robotics, and the dialogue between cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
The seminar will be followed by a lunch buffet, offering a privileged opportunity to exchange with both speakers.
👉 Attendance is free but registration is required
🎥 If you are unable to attend at the B612, you can follow our seminar live
via the following link: