LaVCa: LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Matsuyama, Takuya, Nishimoto, Shinji, Takagi, Yu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915843936354304
author Matsuyama, Takuya
Nishimoto, Shinji
Takagi, Yu
author_facet Matsuyama, Takuya
Nishimoto, Shinji
Takagi, Yu
contents Understanding the property of neural populations (or voxels) in the human brain can advance our comprehension of human perceptual and cognitive processing capabilities and contribute to developing brain-inspired computer models. Recent encoding models using deep neural networks (DNNs) have successfully predicted voxel-wise activity. However, interpreting the properties that explain voxel responses remains challenging because of the black-box nature of DNNs. As a solution, we propose LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning (LaVCa), a data-driven approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate natural-language captions for images to which voxels are selective. By applying LaVCa for image-evoked brain activity, we demonstrate that LaVCa generates captions that describe voxel selectivity more accurately than the previously proposed method. Furthermore, the captions generated by LaVCa quantitatively capture more detailed properties than the existing method at both the inter-voxel and intra-voxel levels. Furthermore, a more detailed analysis of the voxel-specific properties generated by LaVCa reveals fine-grained functional differentiation within regions of interest (ROIs) in the visual cortex and voxels that simultaneously represent multiple distinct concepts. These findings offer profound insights into human visual representations by assigning detailed captions throughout the visual cortex while highlighting the potential of LLM-based methods in understanding brain representations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13606
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LaVCa: LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning
Matsuyama, Takuya
Nishimoto, Shinji
Takagi, Yu
Neurons and Cognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Understanding the property of neural populations (or voxels) in the human brain can advance our comprehension of human perceptual and cognitive processing capabilities and contribute to developing brain-inspired computer models. Recent encoding models using deep neural networks (DNNs) have successfully predicted voxel-wise activity. However, interpreting the properties that explain voxel responses remains challenging because of the black-box nature of DNNs. As a solution, we propose LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning (LaVCa), a data-driven approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate natural-language captions for images to which voxels are selective. By applying LaVCa for image-evoked brain activity, we demonstrate that LaVCa generates captions that describe voxel selectivity more accurately than the previously proposed method. Furthermore, the captions generated by LaVCa quantitatively capture more detailed properties than the existing method at both the inter-voxel and intra-voxel levels. Furthermore, a more detailed analysis of the voxel-specific properties generated by LaVCa reveals fine-grained functional differentiation within regions of interest (ROIs) in the visual cortex and voxels that simultaneously represent multiple distinct concepts. These findings offer profound insights into human visual representations by assigning detailed captions throughout the visual cortex while highlighting the potential of LLM-based methods in understanding brain representations.
title LaVCa: LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning
topic Neurons and Cognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13606