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George A. Alvarez

4 accepted papers

2025

Visual Anagrams Reveal Hidden Differences in Holistic Shape Processing Across Vision Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Humans are able to recognize objects based on both local texture cues and the configuration of object parts, yet contemporary vision models primarily harvest local texture cues, yielding brittle, non-compositional features. Work on shape-vs-texture bias has pitted shape and texture representations i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Manipulating dropout reveals an optimal balance of efficiency and robustness in biological and machine visual systems

ICLR 2024poster

According to the efficient coding hypothesis, neural populations encode information optimally when representations are high-dimensional and uncorrelated. However, such codes may carry a cost in terms of generalization and robustness. Past empirical studies of early visual cortex (V1) in rodents have…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Cognitive Steering in Deep Neural Networks via Long-Range Modulatory Feedback Connections

NeurIPS 2023poster

Given the rich visual information available in each glance, humans can internally direct their visual attention to enhance goal-relevant information---a capacity often absent in standard vision models. Here we introduce cognitively and biologically-inspired long-range modulatory pathways to enable…

2021

Neural Regression, Representational Similarity, Model Zoology & Neural Taskonomy at Scale in Rodent Visual Cortex

NeurIPS 2021poster

How well do deep neural networks fare as models of mouse visual cortex? A majority of research to date suggests results far more mixed than those produced in the modeling of primate visual cortex. Here, we perform a large-scale benchmarking of dozens of deep neural network models in mouse visual cor…