Lab News
RAMP grant awarded for the DALE project
Our Developmental Adaptive Learning Experiment (DALE) was awarded a Vanderbilt RAMP grant. DALE tests whether the way children learn can make training AI models more efficient, using children's word-learning trajectories to build training curricula for CLIP.
Welcome to our Summer 2026 cohort
This summer we welcomed ten new members to the lab, who are joining the DALE, Object Morphs, and Audiovisual Object Embeddings over Development projects. Welcome Ke, Saurab, Yipeng, Aribah, Sanjeev, Ibrahim, Oliver, Anya, Salma, and Alex!
Grace and Nick awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
Congratulations to lab alumni Grace Ko and Nick Cui, who were each awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP)! Grace is continuing to graduate school at Georgia Tech, and Nick at the University of Michigan.
Marren wins second place at the Vanderbilt AI Showcase
Congratulations to Marren Jenkins on winning second place at this year's Vanderbilt AI Showcase!
RAMP grant awarded for Developmental Alignment with AI Models
The lab was awarded a Vanderbilt RAMP grant to support our work on developmental alignment with AI models.
Nick joins the Tovar lab
Nick is an undergraduate student in Biomedical Engineering and will be working on CLIP-based neural alignment with neural spikes and local field potentials.
Clara joins the Tovar lab
Clara is a junior pursuing a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics and will be working on crossmodal AI enhancement, image quality analysis, and perceptual-initialization for vision-language models.
Perceptual-Initialization Research Published on arXiv
This work represents a shift in visual representation learning incorporating human perceptual structure during initialization rather than as a downstream fine-tuning step, yielding significant improvements in zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks.
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New Paper Published in Arxiv
Our latest research on personalized brain inspired AI models is now on Arxiv, code and full submission soon to follow.
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Don joins the Tovar lab
Don is a junior pursuing a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics and will be working on a project looking at how audiovisual learning happens over development
Stephen wins first place at the Vanderbilt AI showcase
Stephen won first place in a field of projects that included AI projects focused on medical chart analysis, gravitational wave data processing, AI-driven film production, gesture-based multimedia control, educational platforms, and brain imaging research.