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Conclusions about Neural Network to Brain Alignment are Profoundly Impacted by the Similarity Measure

Soni, A.; Srivastava, S.; Khosla, M.; Kording, K. P.

2024-08-09 neuroscience
10.1101/2024.08.07.607035 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Deep neural networks are popular models of brain activity, and many studies ask which neural networks provide the best fit. To make such comparisons, the papers use similarity measures such as Linear Predictivity or Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA). It is often assumed that these measures yield comparable results, making their choice inconsequential, but is it? Here we ask if and how the choice of measure affects conclusions. We find that the choice of measure influences layer-area correspondence as well as the ranking of models. We explore how these choices impact prior conclusions about which neural networks are most "brain-like". Our results suggest that widely held conclusions regarding the relative alignment of different neural network models with brain activity have fragile foundations.

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The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

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"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.