Generalization in models of vision

Jan 8, 2025

Evaluating how brains generalize: data from macaque monkeys reveals flaws in deep neural networks

Anne Manning, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, reports on the work of Spandan Madan, Will Xiao and colleagues presented recently in NeurIPS.

This work sheds light on the key Achilles heel of current AI: the poor ability to generalize to new data.

Bono, S., Madan, S., Grover, I., Yasueda, M., Breazeal, C., Pfister, H., & Kreiman, G. (2025). The Indoor-Training Effect: unexpected gains from distribution shifts in the transition function. AAAI. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WSpHklye2Edkm0c_SBPltVCoM081Pj7l/view?usp=sharing
Madan, S., Li, Y., Zhang, M., Pfister, H., & Kreiman, G. (2024). Improving generalization by mimicking the human visual diet. BioRxiv, 2206.07802. https://drive.google.com/file/d/17NhH3cw-cYB9pM2bOdnrkSUNlKR_KbWt/view?usp=sharing
Madan, S., Xiao, W., Cao, M., Pfister, H., Livingstone, M., & Kreiman, G. (2024). Benchmarking out-of-distribution generalization capabilities of DNN-based encoding models for the ventral visual cortex. NeurIPS. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JlzUPI_5BQ1OmPj2e67ZXdv-YJorBWHZ/view?usp=sharing
Madan, S. (2024). Out-of-distribution generalization in biological and artificial intelligence [Harvard University]. https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_azuONFThFBpG4yxAr5KB_e0WBKUeug/view?usp=sharing
Zhang, M., Dellaferrera, G., Sikarwar, A., Armendariz, M., Mudrik, N., Agrawal, P., Madan, S., Barbu, A., Yang, H., Kumar, T., Sadwani, M., Dellaferrera, S., Pizzochero, M., Pfister, H., & Kreiman, G. (2022). Human or Machine? Turing Tests for Vision and Language. ArXiv, 2211.13087. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WhrlNJP9kxS3YeCJYEjbvuz6nRd0lNmG/view?usp=sharing
Bomatter, P., Zhang, M., Karev, D., Madan, S., Tseng, C., & Kreiman, G. (2021). When pigs fly: contextual reasoning in synthetic and natural scenes. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). https://drive.google.com/file/d/11nUVQHh4vucGpmokq-RD0Fl9fJOAYFWu/view?usp=sharing