A Unified Geometric Space Bridging AI Models and the Human Brain

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Silin, Chen, Yuzhong, Wang, Zifan, Wang, Junhao, Jia, Zifeng, Kendrick, Keith M, Zhang, Tuo, Zhao, Lin, Yao, Dezhong, Liu, Tianming, Jiang, Xi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Silin
Chen, Yuzhong
Wang, Zifan
Wang, Junhao
Jia, Zifeng
Kendrick, Keith M
Zhang, Tuo
Zhao, Lin
Yao, Dezhong
Liu, Tianming
Jiang, Xi
author_facet Chen, Silin
Chen, Yuzhong
Wang, Zifan
Wang, Junhao
Jia, Zifeng
Kendrick, Keith M
Zhang, Tuo
Zhao, Lin
Yao, Dezhong
Liu, Tianming
Jiang, Xi
contents For decades, neuroscientists and computer scientists have pursued a shared ambition: to understand intelligence and build it. Modern artificial neural networks now rival humans in language, perception, and reasoning, yet it is still largely unknown whether these artificial systems organize information as the brain does. Existing brain-AI alignment studies have shown the striking correspondence between the two systems, but such comparisons remain bound to specific inputs and tasks, offering no common ground for comparing how AI models with different kinds of modalities-vision, language, or multimodal-are intrinsically organized. Here we introduce a groundbreaking concept of Brain-like Space: a unified geometric space in which every AI model can be precisely situated and compared by mapping its intrinsic spatial attention topological organization onto canonical human functional brain networks, regardless of input modality, task, or sensory domain. Our extensive analysis of 151 Transformer-based models spanning state-of-the-art large vision models, large language models, and large multimodal models uncovers a continuous arc-shaped geometry within this space, reflecting a gradual increase of brain-likeness; different models exhibit distinct distribution patterns within this geometry associated with different degrees of brain-likeness, shaped not merely by their modality but by whether the pretraining paradigm emphasizes global semantic abstraction and whether the positional encoding scheme facilitates deep fusion across different modalities. Moreover, the degree of brain-likeness for a model and its downstream task performance are not "identical twins". The Brain-like Space provides the first unified framework for situating, quantifying, and comparing intelligence across domains, revealing the deep organizational principles that bridge machines and the brain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_24342
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Unified Geometric Space Bridging AI Models and the Human Brain
Chen, Silin
Chen, Yuzhong
Wang, Zifan
Wang, Junhao
Jia, Zifeng
Kendrick, Keith M
Zhang, Tuo
Zhao, Lin
Yao, Dezhong
Liu, Tianming
Jiang, Xi
Artificial Intelligence
For decades, neuroscientists and computer scientists have pursued a shared ambition: to understand intelligence and build it. Modern artificial neural networks now rival humans in language, perception, and reasoning, yet it is still largely unknown whether these artificial systems organize information as the brain does. Existing brain-AI alignment studies have shown the striking correspondence between the two systems, but such comparisons remain bound to specific inputs and tasks, offering no common ground for comparing how AI models with different kinds of modalities-vision, language, or multimodal-are intrinsically organized. Here we introduce a groundbreaking concept of Brain-like Space: a unified geometric space in which every AI model can be precisely situated and compared by mapping its intrinsic spatial attention topological organization onto canonical human functional brain networks, regardless of input modality, task, or sensory domain. Our extensive analysis of 151 Transformer-based models spanning state-of-the-art large vision models, large language models, and large multimodal models uncovers a continuous arc-shaped geometry within this space, reflecting a gradual increase of brain-likeness; different models exhibit distinct distribution patterns within this geometry associated with different degrees of brain-likeness, shaped not merely by their modality but by whether the pretraining paradigm emphasizes global semantic abstraction and whether the positional encoding scheme facilitates deep fusion across different modalities. Moreover, the degree of brain-likeness for a model and its downstream task performance are not "identical twins". The Brain-like Space provides the first unified framework for situating, quantifying, and comparing intelligence across domains, revealing the deep organizational principles that bridge machines and the brain.
title A Unified Geometric Space Bridging AI Models and the Human Brain
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24342