# Transforming Behavioral Neuroscience Discovery with In-Context Learning and AI-Enhanced Tensor Methods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17027 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17027/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Tensor Decomposition for Signal Processing and Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01668/) (2016)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models in Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15567/) (2025)
- [In-context learning enables multimodal large language models to classify cancer pathology images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07407/) (2024)
- [VideoICL: Confidence-based Iterative In-context Learning for Out-of-Distribution Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02186/) (2024)
- [Linked Component Analysis from Matrices to High Order Tensors: Applications to Biomedical Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07416/) (2015)
- [Can Multimodal LLMs do Visual Temporal Understanding and Reasoning? The answer is No!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10674/) (2025)
- [Preliminary Use of Vision Language Model Driven Extraction of Mouse Behavior Towards Understanding Fear Expression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19160/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scientific discovery pipelines typically involve complex, rigid, and time-consuming processes, from data preparation to analyzing and interpreting findings. Recent advances in AI have the potential to transform such pipelines in a way that domain experts can focus on interpreting and understanding findings, rather than debugging rigid pipelines or manually annotating data. As part of an active collaboration between data science/AI researchers and behavioral neuroscientists, we showcase an example AI-enhanced pipeline, specifically designed to transform and accelerate the way that the domain experts in the team are able to gain insights out of experimental data. The application at hand is in the domain of behavioral neuroscience, studying fear generalization in mice, an important problem whose progress can advance our understanding of clinically significant and often debilitating conditions such as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). We identify the emerging paradigm of "In-Context Learning" (ICL) as a suitable interface for domain experts to automate parts of their pipeline without the need for or familiarity with AI model training and fine-tuning, and showcase its remarkable efficacy in data preparation and pattern interpretation. Also, we introduce novel AI-enhancements to tensor decomposition model, which allows for more seamless pattern discovery from the heterogeneous data in our application. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed pipeline experimentally, showcasing its superior performance compared to what is standard practice in the domain, as well as against reasonable ML baselines that do not fall under the ICL paradigm, to ensure that we are not compromising performance in our quest for a seamless and easy-to-use interface for domain experts. Finally, we demonstrate effective discovery, with results validated by the domain experts in the team.