Máté Lengyel
University of Cambridge and Central European University
Biography
Máté Lengyel is professor of computational neuroscience at the University of Cambridge's Department of Engineering and at Central European University's Department of Cognitive Science. His group studies how the brain learns continuously about the environment and uses that knowledge flexibly to make predictions and guide decisions, examining learning and memory at computational, algorithmic and neurobiological levels. The work draws on Bayesian inference and reinforcement learning to characterise the goals and mechanisms of learning, and combines dynamical-systems analyses of biophysical models with close collaborations spanning intracellular recordings, multi-unit recordings in behaving animals and human psychophysics and fMRI.
Research Interests
- Bayesian inference
- memory
- learning
- probabilistic computation
- computational neuroscience
SCENE Teams
Featured Publications
The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience: Studying how the brain interacts with the world
Angelaki DE, Batista A, Fitzgerald T, Kominsky JF, Lengyel M, Mathis A, Mathis MW, Moss CF, Niell CM, Noel JP, Pitkow X, Rothkopf CA, Savin C, Stachenfeld K, Suthana N, Tolias A, Ulanovsky N, Wolpert DM, Wong A, Zimmermann J
Neuron, 2026 · DOI (opens in new tab) · Preprint (PDF) (opens in new tab)
Hierarchical Successor Representation for Robust Transfer
Yu C, Lengyel M
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), PMLR 306, 2026 · Publisher (opens in new tab) · arXiv (opens in new tab)
Curriculum effects in multitask learning through the lens of contextual inference
Shivkumar S, Lengyel M, Wolpert DM
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2025 · DOI (opens in new tab)
Good practices for Bayesian inference in statistical learning
Kovács T, Lengyel M
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2026 · DOI (opens in new tab)