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Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Lu Mi, Trung Le, Tianxing He, Eli Shlizerman, Uygar Sümbül

Neurons can display highly variable dynamics. While such variability presumably supports the wide range of behaviors generated by the organism, their gene expressions are relatively stable in the adult brain. This suggests that neuronal activity is a combination of its time-invariant identity and the inputs the neuron receives from the rest of the circuit. Here, we propose a self-supervised learning based method to assign time-invariant representations to individual neurons based on permutation-, and population size-invariant summary of population recordings. We fit dynamical models to neuronal activity to learn a representation by considering the activity of both the individual and the neighboring population. Our self-supervised approach and use of implicit representations enable robust inference against imperfections such as partial overlap of neurons across sessions, trial-to-trial variability, and limited availability of molecular (transcriptomic) labels for downstream supervised tasks. We demonstrate our method on a public multimodal dataset of mouse cortical neuronal activity and transcriptomic labels. We report >35\% improvement in predicting the transcriptomic subclass identity and >20\% improvement in predicting class identity with respect to the state-of-the-art.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Manjie Xu, Guangyuan Jiang, Wei Liang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

One of the fundamental cognitive abilities of humans is to quickly resolve uncertainty by generating hypotheses and testing them via active trials. Encountering a novel phenomenon accompanied by ambiguous cause-effect relationships, humans make hypotheses against data, conduct inferences from observation, test their theory via experimentation, and correct the proposition if inconsistency arises. These iterative processes persist until the underlying mechanism becomes clear. In this work, we devise the **IVRE** (pronounced as *"ivory"*) environment for evaluating artificial agents' reasoning ability under uncertainty. **IVRE** is an interactive environment featuring rich scenarios centered around *Blicket* detection. Agents in **IVRE** are placed into environments with various ambiguous action-effect pairs and asked to determine each object's role. They are encouraged to propose effective and efficient experiments to validate their hypotheses based on observations and actively gather new information. The game ends when all uncertainties are resolved or the maximum number of trials is consumed. By evaluating modern artificial agents in **IVRE**, we notice a clear failure of today's learning methods compared to humans. Such inefficacy in interactive reasoning ability under uncertainty calls for future research in building human-like intelligence.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Ankur Sikarwar, Mengmi Zhang

Working memory (WM), a fundamental cognitive process facilitating the temporary storage, integration, manipulation, and retrieval of information, plays a vital role in reasoning and decision-making tasks. Robust benchmark datasets that capture the multifaceted nature of WM are crucial for the effective development and evaluation of AI WM models. Here, we introduce a comprehensive Working Memory (WorM) benchmark dataset for this purpose. WorM comprises 10 tasks and a total of 1 million trials, assessing 4 functionalities, 3 domains, and 11 behavioral and neural characteristics of WM. We jointly trained and tested state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and transformers on all these tasks. We also include human behavioral benchmarks as an upper bound for comparison. Our results suggest that AI models replicate some characteristics of WM in the brain, most notably primacy and recency effects, and neural clusters and correlates specialized for different domains and functionalities of WM. In the experiments, we also reveal some limitations in existing models to approximate human behavior. This dataset serves as a valuable resource for communities in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and AI, offering a standardized framework to compare and enhance WM models, investigate WM's neural underpinnings, and develop WM models with human-like capabilities. Our source code and data are available at: https://github.com/ZhangLab-DeepNeuroCogLab/WorM

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Yiqun Duan, Charles Chau, Zhen Wang, Yu-Kai Wang, Chin-teng Lin

The translation of brain dynamics into natural language is pivotal for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), a field that has seen substantial growth in recent years. With the swift advancement of large language models, such as ChatGPT, the need to bridge the gap between the brain and languages becomes increasingly pressing. Current methods, however, require eye-tracking fixations or event markers to segment brain dynamics into word-level features, which can restrict the practical application of these systems. These event markers may not be readily available or could be challenging to acquire during real-time inference, and the sequence of eye fixations may not align with the order of spoken words. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel framework, DeWave, that integrates discrete encoding sequences into open-vocabulary EEG-to-text translation tasks. DeWave uses a quantized variational encoder to derive discrete codex encoding and align it with pre-trained language models. This discrete codex representation brings forth two advantages: 1) it alleviates the order mismatch between eye fixations and spoken words by introducing text-EEG contrastive alignment training, and 2) it minimizes the interference caused by individual differences in EEG waves through an invariant discrete codex. Our model surpasses the previous baseline (40.1 and 31.7) by 3.06% and 6.34\%, respectively, achieving 41.35 BLEU-1 and 33.71 Rouge-F on the ZuCo Dataset. Furthermore, this work is the first to facilitate the translation of entire EEG signal periods without the need for word-level order markers (e.g., eye fixations), scoring 20.5 BLEU-1 and 29.5 Rouge-1 on the ZuCo Dataset, respectively.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Liya Hu, Zhiang Dong, Jingyuan Chen, Guifeng Wang, Zhihua Wang, Zhou Zhao, Fei Wu

The focus of our work is on diagnostic tasks in personalized learning, such as cognitive diagnosis and knowledge tracing. The goal of these tasks is to assess students' latent proficiency on knowledge concepts through analyzing their historical learning records. However, existing research has been limited to single-course scenarios; cross-course studies have not been explored due to a lack of dataset. We address this issue by constructing PTADisc, a Diverse, Immense, Student-centered dataset that emphasizes its sufficient Cross-course information for personalized learning. PTADisc includes 74 courses, 1,530,100 students, 4,054 concepts, 225,615 problems, and over 680 million student response logs. Based on PTADisc, we developed a model-agnostic Cross-Course Learner Modeling Framework (CCLMF) which utilizes relationships between students' proficiency across courses to alleviate the difficulty of diagnosing student knowledge state in cold-start scenarios. CCLMF uses a meta network to generate personalized mapping functions between courses. The experimental results on PTADisc verify the effectiveness of CCLMF with an average improvement of 4.2% on AUC. We also report the performance of baseline models for cognitive diagnosis and knowledge tracing over PTADisc, demonstrating that our dataset supports a wide scope of research in personalized learning. Additionally, PTADisc contains valuable programming logs and student-group information that are worth exploring in the future.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Adarsh Pyarelal, Eric Duong, Caleb Shibu, Paulo Soares, Savannah Boyd, Payal Khosla, Valeria A. Pfeifer, Diheng Zhang, Eric Andrews, Rick Champlin 等

We present a rich, multimodal dataset consisting of data from 40 teams of three humans conducting simulated urban search-and-rescue (SAR) missions in a Minecraft-based testbed, collected for the Theory of Mind-based Cognitive Architecture for Teams (ToMCAT) project. Modalities include two kinds of brain scan data---functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG), as well as skin conductance, heart rate, eye tracking, face images, spoken dialog audio data with automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions, game screenshots, gameplay data, game performance data, demographic data, and self-report questionnaires. Each team undergoes up to six consecutive phases: three behavioral tasks, one mission training session, and two collaborative SAR missions. As time-synchronized multimodal data collected under a variety of circumstances, this dataset will support studying a large variety of research questions on topics including teamwork, coordination, plan recognition, affective computing, physiological linkage, entrainment, and dialog understanding. We provide an initial public release of the de-identified data, along with analyses illustrating the utility of this dataset to both computer scientists and social scientists.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Yaoyu Zhu, Wei Fang, Xiaodong Xie, Tiejun Huang, Zhaofei Yu

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are considered promising brain-inspired energy-efficient models due to their event-driven computing paradigm.The spatiotemporal spike patterns used to convey information in SNNs consist of both rate coding and temporal coding, where the temporal coding is crucial to biological-plausible learning rules such as spike-timing-dependent-plasticity.The time-based training strategy is proposed to better utilize the temporal information in SNNs and learn in an asynchronous fashion.However, some recent works train SNNs by the time-based scheme with rate-coding-dominated loss functions.In this paper, we first map rate-based loss functions to time-based counterparts and explain why they are also applicable to the time-based training scheme.After that, we infer that loss functions providing adequate positive overall gradients help training by theoretical analysis.Based on this, we propose the enhanced counting loss to replace the commonly used mean square counting loss.In addition, we transfer the training of scale factor in weight standardization into thresholds.Experiments show that our approach outperforms previous time-based training methods in most datasets. Our work provides insights for training SNNs with time-based schemes and offers a fresh perspective on the correlation between rate coding and temporal coding.Our code is available at https://github.com/zhuyaoyu/SNN-temporal-training-losses.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Hsiao-Yu Tung, Mingyu Ding, Zhenfang Chen, Daniel Bear, Chuang Gan, Josh Tenenbaum, Dan Yamins, Judith Fan, Kevin Smith

General physical scene understanding requires more than simply localizing and recognizing objects -- it requires knowledge that objects can have different latent properties (e.g., mass or elasticity), and that those properties affect the outcome of physical events. While there has been great progress in physical and video prediction models in recent years, benchmarks to test their performance typically do not require an understanding that objects have individual physical properties, or at best test only those properties that are directly observable (e.g., size or color). This work proposes a novel dataset and benchmark, termed Physion++, that rigorously evaluates visual physical prediction in artificial systems under circumstances where those predictions rely on accurate estimates of the latent physical properties of objects in the scene. Specifically, we test scenarios where accurate prediction relies on estimates of properties such as mass, friction, elasticity, and deformability, and where the values of those properties can only be inferred by observing how objects move and interact with other objects or fluids. We evaluate the performance of a number of state-of-the-art prediction models that span a variety of levels of learning vs. built-in knowledge, and compare that performance to a set of human predictions. We find that models that have been trained using standard regimes and datasets do not spontaneously learn to make inferences about latent properties, but also that models that encode objectness and physical states tend to make better predictions. However, there is still a huge gap between all models and human performance, and all models' predictions correlate poorly with those made by humans, suggesting that no state-of-the-art model is learning to make physical predictions in a human-like way. These results show that current deep learning models that succeed in some settings nevertheless fail to achieve human-level physical prediction in other cases, especially those where latent property inference is required. Project page: https://dingmyu.github.io/physion_v2/

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Jiaxing Xu, Yunhan Yang, David Huang, Sophi Shilpa Gururajapathy, Yiping Ke, Miao Qiao, Alan Wang, Haribalan Kumar, Josh McGeown, Eryn Kwon

This paper presents a comprehensive and quality collection of functional human brain network data for potential research in the intersection of neuroscience, machine learning, and graph analytics. Anatomical and functional MRI images have been used to understand the functional connectivity of the human brain and are particularly important in identifying underlying neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Autism. Recently, the study of the brain in the form of brain networks using machine learning and graph analytics has become increasingly popular, especially to predict the early onset of these conditions. A brain network, represented as a graph, retains rich structural and positional information that traditional examination methods are unable to capture. However, the lack of publicly accessible brain network data prevents researchers from data-driven explorations. One of the main difficulties lies in the complicated domain-specific preprocessing steps and the exhaustive computation required to convert the data from MRI images into brain networks. We bridge this gap by collecting a large amount of MRI images from public databases and a private source, working with domain experts to make sensible design choices, and preprocessing the MRI images to produce a collection of brain network datasets. The datasets originate from 6 different sources, cover 4 brain conditions, and consist of a total of 2,702 subjects. We test our graph datasets on 12 machine learning models to provide baselines and validate the data quality on a recent graph analysis model. To lower the barrier to entry and promote the research in this interdisciplinary field, we release our brain network data and complete preprocessing details including codes at https://doi.org/10.17608/k6.auckland.21397377 and https://github.com/brainnetuoa/data_driven_network_neuroscience.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Drew Linsley, Ivan F Rodriguez Rodriguez, Thomas FEL, Michael Arcaro, Saloni Sharma, Margaret Livingstone, Thomas Serre

One of the most impactful findings in computational neuroscience over the past decade is that the object recognition accuracy of deep neural networks (DNNs) correlates with their ability to predict neural responses to natural images in the inferotemporal (IT) cortex. This discovery supported the long-held theory that object recognition is a core objective of the visual cortex, and suggested that more accurate DNNs would serve as better models of IT neuron responses to images. Since then, deep learning has undergone a revolution of scale: billion parameter-scale DNNs trained on billions of images are rivaling or outperforming humans at visual tasks including object recognition. Have today's DNNs become more accurate at predicting IT neuron responses to images as they have grown more accurate at object recognition?Surprisingly, across three independent experiments, we find that this is not the case. DNNs have become progressively worse models of IT as their accuracy has increased on ImageNet. To understand why DNNs experience this trade-off and evaluate if they are still an appropriate paradigm for modeling the visual system, we turn to recordings of IT that capture spatially resolved maps of neuronal activity elicited by natural images. These neuronal activity maps reveal that DNNs trained on ImageNet learn to rely on different visual features than those encoded by IT and that this problem worsens as their accuracy increases. We successfully resolved this issue with the neural harmonizer, a plug-and-play training routine for DNNs that aligns their learned representations with humans. Our results suggest that harmonized DNNs break the trade-off between ImageNet accuracy and neural prediction accuracy that assails current DNNs and offer a path to more accurate models of biological vision. Our work indicates that the standard approach for modeling IT with task-optimized DNNs needs revision, and other biological constraints, including human psychophysics data, are needed to accurately reverse-engineer the visual cortex.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Kushin Mukherjee, Holly Huey, Xuanchen Lu, Yael Vinker, Rio Aguina-Kang, Ariel Shamir, Judith Fan

Sketching is a powerful tool for creating abstract images that are sparse but meaningful. Sketch understanding poses fundamental challenges for general-purpose vision algorithms because it requires robustness to the sparsity of sketches relative to natural visual inputs and because it demands tolerance for semantic ambiguity, as sketches can reliably evoke multiple meanings. While current vision algorithms have achieved high performance on a variety of visual tasks, it remains unclear to what extent they understand sketches in a human-like way. Here we introduce $\texttt{SEVA}$, a new benchmark dataset containing approximately 90K human-generated sketches of 128 object concepts produced under different time constraints, and thus systematically varying in sparsity. We evaluated a suite of state-of-the-art vision algorithms on their ability to correctly identify the target concept depicted in these sketches and to generate responses that are strongly aligned with human response patterns on the same sketch recognition task. We found that vision algorithms that better predicted human sketch recognition performance also better approximated human uncertainty about sketch meaning, but there remains a sizable gap between model and human response patterns. To explore the potential of models that emulate human visual abstraction in generative tasks, we conducted further evaluations of a recently developed sketch generation algorithm (Vinker et al., 2022) capable of generating sketches that vary in sparsity. We hope that public release of this dataset and evaluation protocol will catalyze progress towards algorithms with enhanced capacities for human-like visual abstraction.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Rainer Engelken

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are biologically-inspired models that are capable of processing information in streams of action potentials. However, simulating and training SNNs is computationally expensive due to the need to solve large systems of coupled differential equations. In this paper, we propose a novel event-based algorithm called SparseProp for simulating and training sparse SNNs. Our algorithm reduces the computational cost of both forward pass and backward pass operations from O(N) to O(log(N)) per network spike, enabling numerically exact simulations of large spiking networks and their efficient training using backpropagation through time. By exploiting the sparsity of the network, SparseProp avoids iterating through all neurons at every spike and uses efficient state updates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SparseProp for several classical integrate-and-fire neuron models, including simulating a sparse SNN with one million LIF neurons, which is sped up by more than four orders of magnitude compared to previous implementations. Our work provides an efficient and exact solution for training large-scale spiking neural networks and opens up new possibilities for building more sophisticated brain-inspired models.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Sergey Shuvaev, Evgeny Amelchenko, Dmitry Smagin, Natalia Kudryavtseva, Grigori Enikolopov, Alex Koulakov

Social conflict is a survival mechanism yielding both normal and pathological behaviors. To understand its underlying principles, we collected behavioral and whole-brain neural data from mice advancing through stages of social conflict. We modeled the animals’ interactions as a normal-form game using Bayesian inference to account for the partial observability of animals’ strengths. We find that our behavioral and neural data are consistent with the first-level Theory of Mind (1-ToM) model where mice form “primary” beliefs about the strengths of all mice involved and “secondary” beliefs that estimate the beliefs of their opponents. Our model identifies the brain regions that carry the information about these beliefs and offers a framework for studies of social behaviors in partially observable settings.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Gehua Ma, Runhao Jiang, Rui Yan, Huajin Tang

Developing computational models of neural response is crucial for understanding sensory processing and neural computations. Current state-of-the-art neural network methods use temporal filters to handle temporal dependencies, resulting in an **unrealistic and inflexible processing paradigm**. Meanwhile, these methods target **trial-averaged firing rates** and fail to capture important features in spike trains. This work presents the temporal conditioning spiking latent variable models (***TeCoS-LVM***) to simulate the neural response to natural visual stimuli. We use spiking neurons to produce spike outputs that directly match the recorded trains. This approach helps to avoid losing information embedded in the original spike trains. We exclude the temporal dimension from the model parameter space and introduce a temporal conditioning operation to allow the model to adaptively explore and exploit temporal dependencies in stimuli sequences in a **natural paradigm**. We show that TeCoS-LVM models can produce more realistic spike activities and accurately fit spike statistics than powerful alternatives. Additionally, learned TeCoS-LVM models can generalize well to longer time scales. Overall, while remaining computationally tractable, our model effectively captures key features of neural coding systems. It thus provides a useful tool for building accurate predictive computational accounts for various sensory perception circuits.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Gabriel Sarch, Michael Tarr, Katerina Fragkiadaki, Leila Wehbe

The alignment between deep neural network (DNN) features and cortical responses currently provides the most accurate quantitative explanation for higher visual areas. At the same time, these model features have been critiqued as uninterpretable explanations, trading one black box (the human brain) for another (a neural network). In this paper, we train networks to directly predict, from scratch, brain responses to images from a large-scale dataset of natural scenes (Allen et. al., 2021). We then use "network dissection" (Bau et. al., 2017), an explainable AI technique used for enhancing neural network interpretability by identifying and localizing the most significant features in images for individual units of a trained network, and which has been used to study category selectivity in the human brain (Khosla & Wehbe, 2022). We adapt this approach to create a hypothesis-neutral model that is then used to explore the tuning properties of specific visual regions beyond category selectivity, which we call "brain dissection". We use brain dissection to examine a range of ecologically important, intermediate properties, including depth, surface normals, curvature, and object relations across sub-regions of the parietal, lateral, and ventral visual streams, and scene-selective regions. Our findings reveal distinct preferences in brain regions for interpreting visual scenes, with ventro-lateral areas favoring closer and curvier features, medial and parietal areas opting for more varied and flatter 3D elements, and the parietal region uniquely preferring spatial relations. Scene-selective regions exhibit varied preferences, as the retrosplenial complex prefers distant and outdoor features, while the occipital and parahippocampal place areas favor proximity, verticality, and in the case of the OPA, indoor elements. Such findings show the potential of using explainable AI to uncover spatial feature selectivity across the visual cortex, contributing to a deeper, more fine-grained understanding of the functional characteristics of human visual cortex when viewing natural scenes.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Tao Fang, Qian Zheng, Gang Pan

Although existing fMRI-to-image reconstruction methods could predict high-quality images, they do not explicitly consider the semantic gap between training and testing data, resulting in reconstruction with unstable and uncertain semantics. This paper addresses the problem of generalized fMRI-to-image reconstruction by explicitly alleviates the semantic gap. Specifically, we leverage the pre-trained CLIP model to map the training data to a compact feature representation, which essentially extends the sparse semantics of training data to dense ones, thus alleviating the semantic gap of the instances nearby known concepts (i.e., inside the training super-classes). Inspired by the robust low-level representation in fMRI data, which could help alleviate the semantic gap for instances that far from the known concepts (i.e., outside the training super-classes), we leverage structural information as a general cue to guide image reconstruction. Further, we quantify the semantic uncertainty based on probability density estimation and achieve Generalized fMRI-to-image reconstruction by adaptively integrating Expanded Semantics and Structural information (GESS) within a diffusion process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GESS model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and we propose a generalized scenario split strategy to evaluate the advantage of GESS in closing the semantic gap.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Aran Nayebi, Rishi Rajalingham, Mehrdad Jazayeri, Guangyu Robert Yang

Humans and animals have a rich and flexible understanding of the physical world, which enables them to infer the underlying dynamical trajectories of objects and events, plausible future states, and use that to plan and anticipate the consequences of actions.However, the neural mechanisms underlying these computations are unclear.We combine a goal-driven modeling approach with dense neurophysiological data and high-throughput human behavioral readouts that contain thousands of comparisons to directly impinge on this question.Specifically, we construct and evaluate several classes of sensory-cognitive networks to predict the future state of rich, ethologically-relevant environments, ranging from self-supervised end-to-end models with pixel-wise or object-slot objectives, to models that future predict in the latent space of purely static image-pretrained or dynamic video-pretrained foundation models.We find that ``scale is \emph{not} all you need'', and that many state-of-the-art machine learning models fail to perform well on our neural and behavioral benchmarks for future prediction.In fact, only one class of models matches these data well overall.We find that neural responses are currently best predicted by models trained to predict the future state of their environment in the \emph{latent} space of pretrained foundation models optimized for \emph{dynamic} scenes in a self-supervised manner.These models also approach the neurons' ability to predict the environmental state variables that are visually hidden from view, despite not being explicitly trained to do so.Finally, we find that not all foundation model latents are equal.Notably, models that future predict in the latent space of video foundation models that are optimized to support a \emph{diverse} range of egocentric sensorimotor tasks, reasonably match \emph{both} human behavioral error patterns and neural dynamics across all environmental scenarios that we were able to test.Overall, these findings suggest that the neural mechanisms and behaviors of primate mental simulation have strong inductive biases associated with them, and are thus far most consistent with being optimized to future predict on \emph{reusable} visual representations that are useful for Embodied AI more generally.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Saurabh Sihag, Gonzalo Mateos, Corey McMillan, Alejandro Ribeiro

In computational neuroscience, there has been an increased interest in developing machine learning algorithms that leverage brain imaging data to provide estimates of "brain age" for an individual. Importantly, the discordance between brain age and chronological age (referred to as "brain age gap") can capture accelerated aging due to adverse health conditions and therefore, can reflect increased vulnerability towards neurological disease or cognitive impairments. However, widespread adoption of brain age for clinical decision support has been hindered due to lack of transparency and methodological justifications in most existing brain age prediction algorithms. In this paper, we leverage coVariance neural networks (VNN) to propose an explanation-driven and anatomically interpretable framework for brain age prediction using cortical thickness features. Specifically, our brain age prediction framework extends beyond the coarse metric of brain age gap in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and we make two important observations: (i) VNNs can assign anatomical interpretability to elevated brain age gap in AD by identifying contributing brain regions, (ii) the interpretability offered by VNNs is contingent on their ability to exploit specific eigenvectors of the anatomical covariance matrix. Together, these observations facilitate an explainable and anatomically interpretable perspective to the task of brain age prediction.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Qi Xu, Yuyuan Gao, Jiangrong Shen, Yaxin Li, Xuming Ran, Huajin Tang, Gang Pan

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) serve as one type of efficient model to process spatio-temporal patterns in time series, such as the Address-Event Representation data collected from Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS). Although convolutional SNNs have achieved remarkable performance on these AER datasets, benefiting from the predominant spatial feature extraction ability of convolutional structure, they ignore temporal features related to sequential time points. In this paper, we develop a recurrent spiking neural network (RSNN) model embedded with an advanced spiking convolutional block attention module (SCBAM) component to combine both spatial and temporal features of spatio-temporal patterns. It invokes the history information in spatial and temporal channels adaptively through SCBAM, which brings the advantages of efficient memory calling and history redundancy elimination. The performance of our model was evaluated in DVS128-Gesture dataset and other time-series datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed SRNN-SCBAM model makes better use of the history information in spatial and temporal dimensions with less memory space, and achieves higher accuracy compared to other models.

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Minkyu Choi, Kuan Han, Xiaokai Wang, Yizhen Zhang, Zhongming Liu

The human visual system uses two parallel pathways for spatial processing and object recognition. In contrast, computer vision systems tend to use a single feedforward pathway, rendering them less robust, adaptive, or efficient than human vision. To bridge this gap, we developed a dual-stream vision model inspired by the human eyes and brain. At the input level, the model samples two complementary visual patterns to mimic how the human eyes use magnocellular and parvocellular retinal ganglion cells to separate retinal inputs to the brain. At the backend, the model processes the separate input patterns through two branches of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to mimic how the human brain uses the dorsal and ventral cortical pathways for parallel visual processing. The first branch (WhereCNN) samples a global view to learn spatial attention and control eye movements. The second branch (WhatCNN) samples a local view to represent the object around the fixation. Over time, the two branches interact recurrently to build a scene representation from moving fixations. We compared this model with the human brains processing the same movie and evaluated their functional alignment by linear transformation. The WhereCNN and WhatCNN branches were found to differentially match the dorsal and ventral pathways of the visual cortex, respectively, primarily due to their different learning objectives, rather than their distinctions in retinal sampling or sensitivity to attention-driven eye movements. These model-based results lead us to speculate that the distinct responses and representations of the ventral and dorsal streams are more influenced by their distinct goals in visual attention and object recognition than by their specific bias or selectivity in retinal inputs. This dual-stream model takes a further step in brain-inspired computer vision, enabling parallel neural networks to actively explore and understand the visual surroundings.