The indoor training effect

feb 17, 2025

Scientists thought this would make AI worse but it made it smarter

Note by Adam Zewe, MIT, about the work by Serena Bono and Spandan Madan in AAAI 2025 (see PDF here).

SciTechDaily

See more related work from the lab:

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