Integrative neurocybernetic modeling in the era of large-scale neuroscience

TL;DR

This paper advocates for integrative neurocybernetic models that unify large-scale neuroscience data to understand brain-behavior dynamics through scalable, principled modeling approaches.

Contribution

It proposes a practical framework combining nonlinear state-space models, meta-dynamical extensions, and connectomics to develop comprehensive, scalable models of neural and behavioral systems.

Findings

Models can infer organizing principles of neural and behavioral dynamics.

Integrative models enable few-shot generalization across datasets.

Combining diverse data sources enhances mechanistic understanding.

Abstract

Large-scale neuroscience is generating rich datasets across animals, brain areas and behavioral contexts, yet our modeling efforts remains fragmented across isolated experiments. We argue that understanding behavior requires integrative neurocybernetic models: understandable dynamical models that capture the closed-loop coupling of brain, body and environment, treat the brain as a controller pursuing latent objectives, represent structured variation across scales, and scale to heterogeneous datasets. Such models shift the goal from predicting neural recordings in isolation to inferring the organizing principles that govern neural and behavioral dynamics. We outline a practical route toward this goal by combining nonlinear state-space models and meta-dynamical extensions with scalable inference, knowledge distillation, mixed open- and closed-loop training, and connectomics-informed architectures. By pooling complementary constraints from recordings, behavior, perturbations and anatomy, integrative neurocybernetic models can provide statistical amplification, few-shot generalization, and mechanistic insight into shared dynamical structure, individual variation, and the control objectives that govern behavior. This agenda offers a model-centric path from fragmented data to a mechanistic science of how brains produce behavior.