Encoding and Decoding Language in the Brain with Language Models

European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)

Date: March 29, 2026 Venue: EACL 2026, Rabat, Morocco Conference Website

This tutorial explores brain-language model alignment, covering encoding models, scaling laws, multilingual brain processing, fine-tuning approaches, and semantic reconstruction from neural data using computational frameworks from the emerging NeuroAI field.

Instructors

Anuja Negi

Anuja Negi
PhD candidate, TU Berlin

Mathis Lamarre

Mathis Lamarre
PhD candidate, TU Berlin

Christine Tseng

Dr. Christine Tseng
Postdoc, TU Berlin

Subba Reddy Oota

Dr. Subba Reddy Oota
Research Scientist, ADIA Lab

Schedule

Time Topic Speaker
9:00–9:45 Introduction to Brain Encoding and Decoding Christine Tseng
9:45–10:30 Representations from LLMs for brain encoding models Mathis Lamarre
11:00–11:40 Scaling laws and Fine-tuning for language models with brain data Anuja Negi
11:40–12:20 Linguistic Brain Decoding Subba Reddy Oota

Learning Objectives

  • Understand fundamental concepts of brain-AI alignment and encoding models
  • Master techniques for brain-informed model fine-tuning
  • Discover practical applications and future research directions in NeuroAI

Target Audience

AI/ML researchers, neuroscientists, NLP practitioners, cognitive scientists, and PhD students with basic deep learning knowledge and familiarity with transformer models.