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Martin Schrimpf

16 accepted papers

2026

Inducing Dyslexia in Vision Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Dyslexia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by persistent reading difficulties, is often linked to reduced activity of the visual word form area in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex. Traditional approaches to studying dyslexia, such as behavioral and neuroimaging methods, have provided…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners: Modular Reasoning with Brain-Like Specialization

ICLR 2026poster

Human cognitive behavior arises from the interaction of specialized brain networks dedicated to distinct functions, such as language, logic, and social reasoning. Inspired by this organization, we propose Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners (MiCRo): a modular, transformer-based architecture post-trained…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Model-Guided Microstimulation Steers Primate Visual Behavior

ICLR 2026poster

Brain stimulation is a powerful tool for understanding cortical function and holds the promise of therapeutic interventions to treat neuropsychiatric disorders such as impaired vision. Prototypical approaches to visual prosthetics apply patterns of electric microstimulation to the early visual corte…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Multimodal Scaling Laws for Task & Data-Optimized Models of Visual Cortex

ICML 2026poster

Task-optimized neural networks are the leading in-silico models of sensory cortex, yet the field lacks a unified understanding of which modeling choices drive improved brain alignment. Prior NeuroAI work is fragmented across datasets and modalities, making it difficult to determine robust scaling tr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Contour Integration Underlies Human-Like Vision

ICML 2025poster

Despite the tremendous success of deep learning in computer vision, models still fall behind humans in generalizing to new input distributions. Existing benchmarks do not investigate the specific failure points of models by analyzing performance under many controlled conditions. Our study systematic…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

From Language to Cognition: How LLMs Outgrow the Human Language Network

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable similarity to neural activity in the human language network. However, the key properties of language underlying this alignment—and how brain-like representations emerge and change across training—remain unclear. We here benchmark 34 training checkpoint

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Scaling Laws for Task-Optimized Models of the Primate Visual Ventral Stream

ICML 2025spotlight

When trained on large-scale object classification datasets, certain artificial neural network models begin to approximate core object recognition behaviors and neural response patterns in the primate brain. While recent machine learning advances suggest that scaling compute, model size, and dataset…

2025

The LLM Language Network: A Neuroscientific Approach for Identifying Causally Task-Relevant Units

NAACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities on not just language tasks, but also various tasks that are not linguistic in nature, such as logical reasoning and social inference. In the human brain, neuroscience has identified a core language system that selectively and causally supp…

2025

TopoLM: brain-like spatio-functional organization in a topographic language model

ICLR 2025oral

Neurons in the brain are spatially organized such that neighbors on tissue often exhibit similar response profiles. In the human language system, experimental studies have observed clusters for syntactic and semantic categories, but the mechanisms underlying this functional organization remain uncle…

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
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

Frivolous Units: Wider Networks Are Not Really That Wide

AAAI 2021technical

A remarkable characteristic of overparameterized deep neural networks (DNNs) is that their accuracy does not degrade when the network width is increased. Recent evidence suggests that developing compressible representations allows the complexity of large networks to be adjusted for the learning task…

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

A Flexible Approach to Automated RNN Architecture Generation

ICLR 2018workshop

The process of designing neural architectures requires expert knowledge and extensive trial and error. While automated architecture search may simplify these requirements, the recurrent neural network (RNN) architectures generated by existing methods are limited in both flexibility and components. W…

Cited by 22SourceScholar