Jianing Mu

Jianing Mu

Jianing Mu

Hi! I'm a fourth year neuroscience PhD student at UC Berkeley, co-advised by Dr. Alex Huth and Dr. Ali Preston.

I'm interested in how humans process and remember continuous, real-life experiences. In particular, I study how the brain understand and remember narratives with the help of LLMs. Conversely, I am also interested in improving the memory of LLMs using lessons learned from human memory.

Research

  1. Efficient uniform sampling explains non-uniform memory of narrative stories
    Jianing Mu, Alison R. Preston, Alexander G. Huth (2025)
    bioRxiv

  2. Position: Episodic Memory is the Missing Piece for Long-Term LLM Agents
    Mathis Pink, Qinyuan Wu, Vy Ai Vo, Javier Turek, Jianing Mu, Alexander Huth, Mariya Toneva (2025)
    arXiv

  3. Assessing Episodic Memory in LLMs with Sequence Order Recall Tasks
    Mathis Pink, Vy A. Vo, Qinyuan Wu, Jianing Mu, Javier S. Turek, Uri Hasson, Kenneth A. Norman, Sebastian Michelmann, Alexander Huth, Mariya Toneva (2024)
    arXiv

  4. Memory Reactivation during Sleep Does Not Act Holistically on Object Memory
    Elizabeth M. Siefert, Sindhuja Uppuluri, Jianing Mu, Marlie C. Tandoc, James W. Antony, Anna C. Schapiro (2024)
    Journal of Neuroscience

  5. Effects of post‐response arousal on cognitive control: Adaptive or maladaptive?
    Rebecca J Compton, Marc Jaskir, Jianing Mu (2022)
    Psychophysiology

  6. Find the silver lining or ignore the cloud? Cognitive reappraisal versus visual attention training.
    Heather Robinson, Elisa Sheen, Rachel Sliwinski, Jianing Mu, Rebecca J Compton (2021)
    Emotion

Teaching

  1. NEU365 Programming and Data Analysis for Modern Neuroscience with Dr. Marcel Goldschen-Ohm
    • Teaching assistant
    • Guest lecturer on Recurrent neural network and transformer language models

Funsies

When I'm not pondering questions about human or artificial intelligence, you could often find me experimenting with new tunes at my piano, chasing the drama (in theaters), debating the optimal interpretation of a Lynchian movie with friends, jumping head first into a pool, and hunting for the best xiao long bao in town.