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Transformer brain encoders explain human high-level visual responses

Neural Information Processing Systems

A major goal of neuroscience is to understand brain computations during visual processing in naturalistic settings. A dominant approach is to use image-computable deep neural networks trained with different task objectives as a basis for linear encoding models. However, in addition to requiring estimation of a large number of linear encoding parameters, this approach ignores the structure of the feature maps both in the brain and the models. Recently proposed alternatives factor the linear mapping into separate sets of spatial and feature weights, thus finding static receptive fields for units, which is appropriate only for early visual areas. In this work, we employ the attention mechanism used in the transformer architecture to study how retinotopic visual features can be dynamically routed to category-selective areas in high-level visual processing. We show that this computational motif is significantly more powerful than alternative methods in predicting brain activity during natural scene viewing, across different feature basis models and modalities. We also show that this approach is inherently more interpretable as the attentionrouting signals for different high-level categorical areas can be easily visualized for any input image. Given its high performance at predicting brain responses to novel images, the model deserves consideration as a candidate mechanistic model of how visual information from retinotopic maps is routed in the human brain based on the relevance of the input content to different category-selective regions.


Hierarchical Frequency Tagging Probe (HFTP): A Unified Approach to Investigate Syntactic Structure Representations in Large Language Models and the Human Brain

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-level or even superior language abilities, effectively modeling syntactic structures, yet the specific computational units responsible remain unclear. A key question is whether LLM behavioral capabilities stem from mechanisms akin to those in the human brain. To address these questions, we introduce the Hierarchical Frequency Tagging Probe (HFTP), a tool that utilizes frequency-domain analysis to identify neuron-wise components of LLMs (e.g., individual Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neurons) and cortical regions (via intracranial recordings) encoding syntactic structures. Our results show that models such as GPT-2, Gemma, Gemma 2, Llama 2, Llama 3.1, and GLM-4 process syntax in analogous layers, while the human brain relies on distinct cortical regions for different syntactic levels. Representational similarity analysis reveals a stronger alignment between LLM representations and the left hemisphere of the brain (dominant in language processing). Notably, upgraded models exhibit divergent trends: Gemma 2 shows greater brain similarity than Gemma, while Llama 3.1 shows less alignment with the brain compared to Llama 2. These findings offer new insights into the interpretability of LLM behavioral improvements, raising questions about whether these advancements are driven by human-like or non-human-like mechanisms, and establish HFTP as a valuable tool bridging computational linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. This project is available at https://github.com/LilTiger/HFTP.


The unexpected science hiding in Dante's 'Inferno'

Popular Science

The poem appears to have geophysics and geology that was not understood in medieval times. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. "The Divine Comedy" is divided into the "Inferno," "Purgatorio," and "Paradiso." Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Dante Alighieri's is one of the most famous Italian literary works, if not most famous.


fMRI predictors based on language models of increasing complexity recover brain left lateralization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Over the past decade, studies of naturalistic language processing where participants are scanned while listening to continuous text have flourished. Using word embeddings at first, then large language models, researchers have created encoding models to analyze the brain signals. Presenting these models with the same text as the participants allows to identify brain areas where there is a significant correlation between the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) time series and the ones predicted by the models' artificial neurons. One intriguing finding from these studies is that they have revealed highly symmetric bilateral activation patterns, somewhat at odds with the well-known left lateralization of language processing. Here, we report analyses of an fMRI dataset where we manipulate the complexity of large language models, testing 28 pretrained models from 8 different families, ranging from 124M to 14.2B parameters. First, we observe that the performance of models in predicting brain responses follows a scaling law, where the fit with brain activity increases linearly with the logarithm of the number of parameters of the model (and its performance on natural language processing tasks). Second, although this effect is present in both hemispheres, it is stronger in the left than in the right hemisphere. Specifically, the left-right difference in brain correlation follows a scaling law with the number of parameters. This finding reconciles computational analyses of brain activity using large language models with the classic observation from aphasic patients showing left hemisphere dominance for language.





PoissonFlowGenerativeModels

Neural Information Processing Systems

We prove that if these charges flow upward along electric field lines, their initial distribution in the z = 0 plane transforms into a distribution on the hemisphere of radiusr that becomes uniform in the r limit. To learn the bijective transformation, we estimate the normalized field in the augmented space.


Do trees really explode in extreme cold?

Popular Science

Do trees really explode in extreme cold? The answer involves frozen sap, the polar vortex, and a lot of internet exaggeration. Heavy snow fall, not explosions, are far more threatening to trees and yourself. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The majority of the United States is bracing itself for a potentially historic polar vortex winter storm this weekend .


Finding Optimal Tangent Points for Reducing Distortions of Hard-label Attacks

Neural Information Processing Systems

One major problem in black-box adversarial attacks is the high query complexity in the hard-label attack setting, where only the top-1 predicted label is available. In this paper, we propose a novel geometric-based approach called Tangent Attack (TA), which identifies an optimal tangent point of a virtual hemisphere located on the decision boundary to reduce the distortion of the attack. Assuming the decision boundary is locally flat, we theoretically prove that the minimum $\ell_2$ distortion can be obtained by reaching the decision boundary along the tangent line passing through such tangent point in each iteration. To improve the robustness of our method, we further propose a generalized method which replaces the hemisphere with a semi-ellipsoid to adapt to curved decision boundaries. Our approach is free of pre-training. Extensive experiments conducted on the ImageNet and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that our approach can consume only a small number of queries to achieve the low-magnitude distortion. The implementation source code is released online.