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James J DiCarlo

13 accepted papers

2025

L-WISE: Boosting Human Visual Category Learning Through Model-Based Image Selection and Enhancement

ICLR 2025poster

The currently leading artificial neural network models of the visual ventral stream - which are derived from a combination of performance optimization and robustification methods - have demonstrated a remarkable degree of behavioral alignment with humans on visual categorization tasks. We show that…

2025

Vision CNNs trained to estimate spatial latents learned similar ventral-stream-aligned representations

ICLR 2025poster

Studies of the functional role of the primate ventral visual stream have traditionally focused on object categorization, often ignoring -- despite much prior evidence -- its role in estimating "spatial" latents such as object position and pose. Most leading ventral stream models are derived by optim…

2023

Aligning Model and Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex Representations Improves Model-to-Human Behavioral Alignment and Adversarial Robustness

ICLR 2023top-5%

While some state-of-the-art artificial neural network systems in computer vision are strikingly accurate models of the corresponding primate visual processing, there are still many discrepancies between these models and the behavior of primates on object recognition tasks. Many current models suffer…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2023

Strong and Precise Modulation of Human Percepts via Robustified ANNs

NeurIPS 2023poster

The visual object category reports of artificial neural networks (ANNs) are notoriously sensitive to tiny, adversarial image perturbations. Because human category reports (aka human percepts) are thought to be insensitive to those same small-norm perturbations -- and locally stable in general -- thi…

2022

How Well Do Unsupervised Learning Algorithms Model Human Real-time and Life-long Learning?

NeurIPS 2022accept

Humans learn from visual inputs at multiple timescales, both rapidly and flexibly acquiring visual knowledge over short periods, and robustly accumulating online learning progress over longer periods. Modeling these powerful learning capabilities is an important problem for computational visual cogn…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2022

The ThreeDWorld Transport Challenge: A Visually Guided Task-and-Motion Planning Benchmark Towards Physically Realistic Embodied AI

ICRA 2022poster

We introduce a visually-guided task-and-motion planning benchmark, which we call the ThreeDWorld Trans-port Challenge. In this challenge, an embodied agent is spawned randomly in a simulated physical home environment and required to transport a small set of objects scattered around the house with co…

Cited by 46SourceScholar
2022

Wiring Up Vision: Minimizing Supervised Synaptic Updates Needed to Produce a Primate Ventral Stream

ICLR 2022spotlight

After training on large datasets, certain deep neural networks are surprisingly good models of the neural mechanisms of adult primate visual object recognition. Nevertheless, these models are considered poor models of the development of the visual system because they posit millions of sequential, pr…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2021

Neural Population Geometry Reveals the Role of Stochasticity in Robust Perception

NeurIPS 2021poster

Adversarial examples are often cited by neuroscientists and machine learning researchers as an example of how computational models diverge from biological sensory systems. Recent work has proposed adding biologically-inspired components to visual neural networks as a way to improve their adversarial…

2021

ThreeDWorld: A Platform for Interactive Multi-Modal Physical Simulation

NeurIPS 2021poster

We introduce ThreeDWorld (TDW), a platform for interactive multi-modal physical simulation. TDW enables the simulation of high-fidelity sensory data and physical interactions between mobile agents and objects in rich 3D environments. Unique properties include real-time near-photo-realistic image ren…

Cited by 342SourcecodeScholar
2020

Simulating a Primary Visual Cortex at the Front of CNNs Improves Robustness to Image Perturbations

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Current state-of-the-art object recognition models are largely based on convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, which are loosely inspired by the primate visual system. However, these CNNs can be fooled by imperceptibly small, explicitly crafted perturbations, and struggle to recognize obj…

2019

Brain-Like Object Recognition with High-Performing Shallow Recurrent ANNs

NeurIPS 2019oral

Deep convolutional artificial neural networks (ANNs) are the leading class of candidate models of the mechanisms of visual processing in the primate ventral stream. While initially inspired by brain anatomy, over the past years, these ANNs have evolved from a simple eight-layer architecture in AlexN…

2018

Task-Driven Convolutional Recurrent Models of the Visual System

NeurIPS 2018poster

Feed-forward convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are currently state-of-the-art for object classification tasks such as ImageNet. Further, they are quantitatively accurate models of temporally-averaged responses of neurons in the primate brain's visual system. However, biological visual systems ha…