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Main Authors: Yan, Haijiang, Chater, Nick, Sanborn, Adam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03882
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author Yan, Haijiang
Chater, Nick
Sanborn, Adam
author_facet Yan, Haijiang
Chater, Nick
Sanborn, Adam
contents Incorporating individual-level cognitive priors offers an important route to personalizing neural networks, yet accurately eliciting such priors remains challenging: existing methods either fail to uniquely identify them or introduce systematic biases. Here, we introduce PriorProbe, a novel elicitation approach grounded in Markov Chain Monte Carlo with People that recovers fine-grained, individual-specific priors. Focusing on a facial expression recognition task, we apply PriorProbe to individual participants and test whether integrating the recovered priors with a state-of-the-art neural network improves its ability to predict an individual's classification on ambiguous stimuli. The PriorProbe-derived priors yield substantial performance gains, outperforming both the neural network alone and alternative sources of priors, while preserving the network's inference on ground-truth labels. Together, these results demonstrate that PriorProbe provides a general and interpretable framework for personalizing deep neural networks.
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spellingShingle PriorProbe: Recovering Individual-Level Priors for Personalizing Neural Networks in Facial Expression Recognition
Yan, Haijiang
Chater, Nick
Sanborn, Adam
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Incorporating individual-level cognitive priors offers an important route to personalizing neural networks, yet accurately eliciting such priors remains challenging: existing methods either fail to uniquely identify them or introduce systematic biases. Here, we introduce PriorProbe, a novel elicitation approach grounded in Markov Chain Monte Carlo with People that recovers fine-grained, individual-specific priors. Focusing on a facial expression recognition task, we apply PriorProbe to individual participants and test whether integrating the recovered priors with a state-of-the-art neural network improves its ability to predict an individual's classification on ambiguous stimuli. The PriorProbe-derived priors yield substantial performance gains, outperforming both the neural network alone and alternative sources of priors, while preserving the network's inference on ground-truth labels. Together, these results demonstrate that PriorProbe provides a general and interpretable framework for personalizing deep neural networks.
title PriorProbe: Recovering Individual-Level Priors for Personalizing Neural Networks in Facial Expression Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03882