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Felix A. Wichmann

8 accepted papers

2026

Low-Pass Filtering Improves Behavioral Alignment of Vision Models

ICLR 2026poster

Despite their impressive performance on computer vision benchmarks, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) still fall short of adequately modeling human visual behavior, as measured by error consistency and shape bias. Recent work hypothesized that behavioral alignment can be drastically improved through gener…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Quantifying Uncertainty in Error Consistency: Towards Reliable Behavioral Comparison of Classifiers

NeurIPS 2025poster

Benchmarking models is a key factor for the rapid progress in machine learning (ML) research. Thus, further progress depends on improving benchmarking metrics. A standard metric to measure the behavioral alignment between ML models and human observers is error consistency (EC). EC allows for more fi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Trivial or Impossible --- dichotomous data difficulty masks model differences (on ImageNet and beyond)

ICLR 2022poster

"The power of a generalization system follows directly from its biases" (Mitchell 1980). Today, CNNs are incredibly powerful generalisation systems---but to what degree have we understood how their inductive bias influences model decisions? We here attempt to disentangle the various aspects that det…

2021

Partial success in closing the gap between human and machine vision

NeurIPS 2021oral

A few years ago, the first CNN surpassed human performance on ImageNet. However, it soon became clear that machines lack robustness on more challenging test cases, a major obstacle towards deploying machines "in the wild" and towards obtaining better computational models of human visual perception.…

2020

Beyond accuracy: quantifying trial-by-trial behaviour of CNNs and humans by measuring error consistency

NeurIPS 2020poster

A central problem in cognitive science and behavioural neuroscience as well as in machine learning and artificial intelligence research is to ascertain whether two or more decision makers---be they brains or algorithms---use the same strategy. Accuracy alone cannot distinguish between strategies: tw…

2019

ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness

ICLR 2019oral

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are commonly thought to recognise objects by learning increasingly complex representations of object shapes. Some recent studies suggest a more important role of image textures. We here put these conflicting hypotheses to a quantitative test by evaluating CNNs an…

2019

Perceiving the arrow of time in autoregressive motion

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

Understanding the principles of causal inference in the visual system has a long history at least since the seminal studies by Albert Michotte. Many cognitive and machine learning scientists believe that intelligent behavior requires agents to possess causal models of the world. Recent ML algorithms…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2018

Generalisation in humans and deep neural networks

NeurIPS 2018poster

We compare the robustness of humans and current convolutional deep neural networks (DNNs) on object recognition under twelve different types of image degradations. First, using three well known DNNs (ResNet-152, VGG-19, GoogLeNet) we find the human visual system to be more robust to nearly all of th…