Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Saha, Shreya, Chadha, Ishaan, Khosla, Meenakshi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14031
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908546086469632
author Saha, Shreya
Chadha, Ishaan
Khosla, Meenakshi
author_facet Saha, Shreya
Chadha, Ishaan
Khosla, Meenakshi
contents Over the past decade, predictive modeling of neural responses in the primate visual system has advanced significantly, largely driven by various DNN approaches. These include models optimized directly for visual recognition, cross-modal alignment through contrastive objectives, neural response prediction from scratch, and large language model embeddings.Likewise, different readout mechanisms, ranging from fully linear to spatial-feature factorized methods have been explored for mapping network activations to neural responses. Despite the diversity of these approaches, it remains unclear which method performs best across different visual regions. In this study, we systematically compare these approaches for modeling the human visual system and investigate alternative strategies to improve response predictions. Our findings reveal that for early to mid-level visual areas, response-optimized models with visual inputs offer superior prediction accuracy, while for higher visual regions, embeddings from LLMs based on detailed contextual descriptions of images and task-optimized models pretrained on large vision datasets provide the best fit. Through comparative analysis of these modeling approaches, we identified three distinct regions in the visual cortex: one sensitive primarily to perceptual features of the input that are not captured by linguistic descriptions, another attuned to fine-grained visual details representing semantic information, and a third responsive to abstract, global meanings aligned with linguistic content. We also highlight the critical role of readout mechanisms, proposing a novel scheme that modulates receptive fields and feature maps based on semantic content, resulting in an accuracy boost of 3-23% over existing SOTAs for all models and brain regions. Together, these findings offer key insights into building more precise models of the visual system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_14031
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modeling the Human Visual System: Comparative Insights from Response-Optimized and Task-Optimized Vision Models, Language Models, and different Readout Mechanisms
Saha, Shreya
Chadha, Ishaan
Khosla, Meenakshi
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Machine Learning
Over the past decade, predictive modeling of neural responses in the primate visual system has advanced significantly, largely driven by various DNN approaches. These include models optimized directly for visual recognition, cross-modal alignment through contrastive objectives, neural response prediction from scratch, and large language model embeddings.Likewise, different readout mechanisms, ranging from fully linear to spatial-feature factorized methods have been explored for mapping network activations to neural responses. Despite the diversity of these approaches, it remains unclear which method performs best across different visual regions. In this study, we systematically compare these approaches for modeling the human visual system and investigate alternative strategies to improve response predictions. Our findings reveal that for early to mid-level visual areas, response-optimized models with visual inputs offer superior prediction accuracy, while for higher visual regions, embeddings from LLMs based on detailed contextual descriptions of images and task-optimized models pretrained on large vision datasets provide the best fit. Through comparative analysis of these modeling approaches, we identified three distinct regions in the visual cortex: one sensitive primarily to perceptual features of the input that are not captured by linguistic descriptions, another attuned to fine-grained visual details representing semantic information, and a third responsive to abstract, global meanings aligned with linguistic content. We also highlight the critical role of readout mechanisms, proposing a novel scheme that modulates receptive fields and feature maps based on semantic content, resulting in an accuracy boost of 3-23% over existing SOTAs for all models and brain regions. Together, these findings offer key insights into building more precise models of the visual system.
title Modeling the Human Visual System: Comparative Insights from Response-Optimized and Task-Optimized Vision Models, Language Models, and different Readout Mechanisms
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14031