Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024) Main Conference Track
Alexander Lappe, Anna Bognár, Ghazaleh Ghamkahri Nejad, Albert Mukovskiy, Lucas Martini, Martin A. Giese, Rufin Vogels
High-level visual brain regions contain subareas in which neurons appear to respond more strongly to examples of a particular semantic category, like faces or bodies, rather than objects. However, recent work has shown that while this finding holds on average, some out-of-category stimuli also activate neurons in these regions. This may be due to visual features common among the preferred class also being present in other images. Here, we propose a deep-learning-based approach for visualizing these features. For each neuron, we identify relevant visual features driving its selectivity by modelling responses to images based on latent activations of a deep neural network. Given an out-of-category image which strongly activates the neuron, our method first identifies a reference image from the preferred category yielding a similar feature activation pattern. We then backpropagate latent activations of both images to the pixel level, while enhancing the identified shared dimensions and attenuating non-shared features. The procedure highlights image regions containing shared features driving responses of the model neuron. We apply the algorithm to novel recordings from body-selective regions in macaque IT cortex in order to understand why some images of objects excite these neurons. Visualizations reveal object parts which resemble parts of a macaque body, shedding light on neural preference of these objects.