Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M Postdoctoral Offer: Metacognition in Bio-Realistic Artificial Intelligence Networks

The Inria center at the University of Bordeaux is one of the nine Inria centers in France and has about twenty research teams.. The Inria centre is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative SMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute...

The Inria center at the University of Bordeaux is one of the nine Inria centers in France and has about twenty research teams. The Inria centre is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative SMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute...

Every year Inria International Relations Department has a few postdoctoral positions in order to support Inria international collaborations.

The postdoctoral contract will have a duration of 24 months. The default start date is November 1st, 2025 and not later than January, 1st 2026. The postdoctoral fellow will be recruited by one of the Inria Centres in France but it is recommended that the time is shared between France and the partner’s country (please note that the postdoctoral fellow has to start his/her contract being in France and that the visits have to respect Inria rules for missions).

Candidates for postdoctoral positions are recruited after the end of their Ph.D. or after a first post-doctoral period: for the candidates who obtained their PhD in the Northern hemisphere, the date of the Ph.D. defense shall be later than September 1, 2022; in the Southern hemisphere, later than April 1, 2022.

In order to encourage mobility, the postdoctoral position must take place in a scientific environment that is truly different from the one of the Ph.D. (and, if applicable, from the position held since the Ph.D.); particular attention is thus paid to French or international candidates who obtained their doctorate abroad.

Metacognition is the cognitive process by which, instead of just learning to associate a response or a behavior with a situation, animals (and mainly primates) monitor the functioning (and particularly errors) of simple cognitive processes, learn to inhibit automatic responses and promote instead contextually appropriate behavioral rules.

Better understanding and modeling this process is important for several reasons. In cognitive neuroscience, it paves the way to exploring higher cognitive functions like reasoning, imagination and other kinds of deliberation-based thoughts. In Artificial Intelligence, it stands on the same grounds as Generative AI and proposes different processes and algorithms that might remedy several weaknesses of GenAI and suggest innovative brain-inspired extensions.

The Mnemosyne Inria team in Bordeaux and the Machine Learning CWI group in Amsterdam have a long experience in cognitive computational neuroscience and have recently launched a new project, MetaBrain, with the aim of specifying the computational mechanisms of metacognition, defining relevant tasks to assess the performance of metacognitive models and organizing a network of international teams contributing to the topic.

The role of the postdoctoral fellow to be recruited is to participate to the MetaBrain project, under the following axes:

Axis 1: Specification of Metacognition and its main computational mechanisms:

When several elementary competences have been learned (possibility to associate a response with a situation), the role of Metacognition (or cognitive control) is to control the performances of the competences, the selection or the coordination of the most appropriate ones depending on the context, or the creation of a new one. This is generally described through three main mechanisms: (i) the possibility to monitor cues indicating difficulties in the process of problem solving (errors or conflicts between resources), in order to inhibit elementary default responses, (ii) working memory to keep in sustained activity the different aspects to be integrated (goals and subgoals, predictions, constraints) and (iii) cognitive flexibility corresponding to new goals and contextual rules that can be learned and integrated in the process of problem solving.

Our two teams have already proposed models that address several aspects of these mechanisms (Dagar et al., 2021; Kruijne et al., 2020; Nallapu et al., 2019; Van den Berg, 2023) and are also aware of several other models in the literature proposing other candidate mechanisms (see for example Alexander and Brown, 2015; Botvinick et al., 2001, Collins et al., 2012; Domenech et al., 2015; Miller et al, 2024). All these models indicate possible correspondence with cerebral circuitries and adaptive operations. Nevertheless, they are many and split these general mechanisms in different pieces which are not always consistent and may differ under several aspects. A major contribution will be to carry out a thorough analysis of these elements, to propose a synthesis associating both a precise description of the mechanisms and a map of their functional dependencies.

Axis 2: Definition of relevant tasks in the domain of visual reasoning:

Although many standard tasks have been defined and shared for simple sensorimotor control, it is not yet the case for cognitive control, generally corresponding to much more complex behaviors. A variety of tasks have been proposed in models mentioned above but they differently integrate fundamental constituents such as hierarchical and temporal dependencies. In a similar view of standardization as in the axis above, the goal will be consequently to enumerate properties that have to be assessed when developing such metacognitive models and propose or design corresponding tasks.

Subsequently, the postdoctoral fellow will work on integrating the insights from Axis 1 and task definitions in this Axis, with an architecture that integrates selected mechanisms from the different frameworks, particularly under the perspective of extending and evaluating models proposed in our teams with novel properties.

Axis 3: Organization of an international network of collaboration on the topic:

We have already begun to identify and contact international (mainly European) teams working on the topic and willing to contribute to the elaboration of such a roadmap, toward more ambitious international projects. A corresponding goal will be to interact with these partners and to help with the preparation of such projects.

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of partial teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage

Gross monthly remuneration (before salary charges and taxes): 2927 euros