18,521 research outputs found
Binocular contrast discrimination needs monocular multiplicative noise.
The effects of signal and noise on contrast discrimination are difficult to separate because of a singularity in the signal-detection-theory model of two-alternative forced-choice contrast discrimination (Katkov, Tsodyks, & Sagi, 2006). In this article, we show that it is possible to eliminate the singularity by combining that model with a binocular combination model to fit monocular, dichoptic, and binocular contrast discrimination. We performed three experiments using identical stimuli to measure the perceived phase, perceived contrast, and contrast discrimination of a cyclopean sine wave. In the absence of a fixation point, we found a binocular advantage in contrast discrimination both at low contrasts (<4%), consistent with previous studies, and at high contrasts (≥34%), which has not been previously reported. However, control experiments showed no binocular advantage at high contrasts in the presence of a fixation point or for observers without accommodation. We evaluated two putative contrast-discrimination mechanisms: a nonlinear contrast transducer and multiplicative noise (MN). A binocular combination model (the DSKL model; Ding, Klein, & Levi, 2013b) was first fitted to both the perceived-phase and the perceived-contrast data sets, then combined with either the nonlinear contrast transducer or the MN mechanism to fit the contrast-discrimination data. We found that the best model combined the DSKL model with early MN. Model simulations showed that, after going through interocular suppression, the uncorrelated noise in the two eyes became anticorrelated, resulting in less binocular noise and therefore a binocular advantage in the discrimination task. Combining a nonlinear contrast transducer or MN with a binocular combination model (DSKL) provides a powerful method for evaluating the two putative contrast-discrimination mechanisms
Second order scattering descriptors predict fMRI activity due to visual textures
Second layer scattering descriptors are known to provide good classification
performance on natural quasi-stationary processes such as visual textures due
to their sensitivity to higher order moments and continuity with respect to
small deformations. In a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
experiment we present visual textures to subjects and evaluate the predictive
power of these descriptors with respect to the predictive power of simple
contour energy - the first scattering layer. We are able to conclude not only
that invariant second layer scattering coefficients better encode voxel
activity, but also that well predicted voxels need not necessarily lie in known
retinotopic regions.Comment: 3nd International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in NeuroImaging
(2013
Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives
The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data
representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different
representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory
factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be
used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be
used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful
representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews
recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning,
covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning,
and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the
appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing
representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between
representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning
The Neural Representation Benchmark and its Evaluation on Brain and Machine
A key requirement for the development of effective learning representations
is their evaluation and comparison to representations we know to be effective.
In natural sensory domains, the community has viewed the brain as a source of
inspiration and as an implicit benchmark for success. However, it has not been
possible to directly test representational learning algorithms directly against
the representations contained in neural systems. Here, we propose a new
benchmark for visual representations on which we have directly tested the
neural representation in multiple visual cortical areas in macaque (utilizing
data from [Majaj et al., 2012]), and on which any computer vision algorithm
that produces a feature space can be tested. The benchmark measures the
effectiveness of the neural or machine representation by computing the
classification loss on the ordered eigendecomposition of a kernel matrix
[Montavon et al., 2011]. In our analysis we find that the neural representation
in visual area IT is superior to visual area V4. In our analysis of
representational learning algorithms, we find that three-layer models approach
the representational performance of V4 and the algorithm in [Le et al., 2012]
surpasses the performance of V4. Impressively, we find that a recent supervised
algorithm [Krizhevsky et al., 2012] achieves performance comparable to that of
IT for an intermediate level of image variation difficulty, and surpasses IT at
a higher difficulty level. We believe this result represents a major milestone:
it is the first learning algorithm we have found that exceeds our current
estimate of IT representation performance. We hope that this benchmark will
assist the community in matching the representational performance of visual
cortex and will serve as an initial rallying point for further correspondence
between representations derived in brains and machines.Comment: The v1 version contained incorrectly computed kernel analysis curves
and KA-AUC values for V4, IT, and the HT-L3 models. They have been corrected
in this versio
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