High-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The human brain extracts complex information from visual inputs, including objects, their spatial and semantic interrelations, and their interactions with the environment. However, a quantitative approach for studying this information remains elusive. Here we test whether the contextual information encoded in large language models (LLMs) is beneficial for modelling the complex visual information extracted by the brain from natural scenes. We show that LLM embeddings of scene captions successfully characterize brain activity evoked by viewing the natural scenes. This mapping captures selectivities of different brain areas and is sufficiently robust that accurate scene captions can be reconstructed from brain activity. Using carefully controlled model comparisons, we then proceed to show that the accuracy with which LLM representations match brain representations derives from the ability of LLMs to integrate complex information contained in scene captions beyond that conveyed by individual words. Finally, we train deep neural network models to transform image inputs into LLM representations. Remarkably, these networks learn representations that are better aligned with brain representations than a large number of state-of-the-art alternative models, despite being trained on orders-of-magnitude less data. Overall, our results suggest that LLM embeddings of scene captions provide a representational format that accounts for complex information extracted by the brain from visual inputs.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it