The Neural Representation Benchmark and its Evaluation on Brain and
    Machine
Authors: Charles Cadieu, Ha Hong, Dan Yamins, Nicolas Pinto, Najib J. Majaj, James J. DiCarlo
ICLR 2013

Abstract: A key requirement for the development of effective learning representations is their evaluation and comparison to representations we know to be effective. In natural sensory domains, the community has viewed the brain as a source of inspiration and as an implicit benchmark for success. However, it has not been possible to directly test representational learning algorithms directly against the representations contained in neural systems. Here, we propose a new benchmark for visual representations on which we have directly tested the neural representation in multiple visual cortical areas in macaque (utilizing data from [Majaj et al., 2012]), and on which any computer vision algorithm that produces a feature space can be tested. The benchmark measures the effectiveness of the neural or machine representation by computing the classification loss on the ordered eigendecomposition of a kernel matrix [Montavon et al., 2011]. In our analysis we find that the neural representation in visual area IT is superior to visual area V4, indicating an increase in representational performance in higher levels of the cortical visual hierarchy. In our analysis of representational learning algorithms, we find that a number of current algorithms approach the representational performance of V4. Impressively, we find that a recent supervised algorithm [Krizhevsky et al., 2012] achieves performance equal to that of IT for an intermediate level of image variation difficulty, and performs between V4 and IT at a higher difficulty level. We believe this result represents a major milestone: it is the first learning algorithm we have found that produces a representation on par with IT on this task of intermediate difficulty. We hope that this benchmark will serve as an initial rallying point for further correspondence between representations derived in brains and machines.

The Neural Representation Benchmark and its
Evaluation on Brain and Machine
Charles F. Cadieu, Ha Hong, Dan Yamins, Nicolas Pinto, Najib J. Majaj, James J. DiCarlo
McGovern Institute for Brain Research and
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
cadieu@mit.edu
Abstract
A key requirement for the development of effective learning representations is
their evaluation and comparison to representations we know to be effective. In
natural sensory domains, the community has viewed the brain as a source of in-
spiration and as an implicit benchmark for success. However, it has not been
possible to directly test representational learning algorithms directly against the
representations contained in neural systems. Here, we propose a new benchmark
for visual representations on which we have directly tested the neural representa-
tion in multiple visual cortical areas in macaque (utilizing data from [Majaj et al.,
2012]), and on which any computer vision algorithm that produces a feature space
can be tested. The benchmark measures the effectiveness of the neural or machine
representation by computing the classiﬁcation loss on the ordered eigendecom-
position of a kernel matrix [Montavon et al., 2011]. In our analysis we ﬁnd that
the neural representation in visual area IT is superior to visual area V4, indicating
an increase in representational performance in higher levels of the cortical visual
hierarchy. In our analysis of representational learning algorithms, we ﬁnd that
three-layer models approach the representational performance of V4 and the algo-
rithm in [Le et al., 2012] surpasses the performance of V4. Impressively, we ﬁnd
that a recent supervised algorithm [Krizhevsky et al., 2012] achieves performance
comparable to that of IT for an intermediate level of image variation difﬁculty,
and surpasses IT at a higher difﬁculty level. We believe this result represents a
major milestone: it is the ﬁrst learning algorithm we have found that exceeds our
current estimate of IT representation performance. To enable researchers to utilize
this benchmark, we make available image datasets, analysis tools, and neural mea-
surements of V4 and IT. We hope that this benchmark will assist the community
in matching the representational performance of visual cortex and will serve as an
initial rallying point for further correspondence between representations derived
in brains and machines.
1 Introduction
One of the primary goals of representational learning is to produce algorithms that learn transforma-
tions from unstructured data and produce representational spaces that are well suited to problems of
interest, such as visual object recognition or auditory speech recognition. In the pursuit of this goal,
the brain and the representations that it produces has been used as a source of inspiration and even
suggested as a benchmark for success in the ﬁeld. In this work, we attempt to provide a new bench-
mark to measure progress in representational learning with deﬁned measures of success relative to
high-level visual cortex.
1
arXiv:1301.3530v2  [cs.NE]  25 Jan 2013
The machine learning and signal processing communities have achieved many successes by incor-
porating insights from neural processing, even when a complete understanding of the neural systems
was lacking. The initial formulations of neural networks took explicit inspiration for how neurons
might transform their inputs [Rosenblatt, 1958]. David Lowe, in his original formulation of the
SIFT algorithm cites inspiration from complex cells in primary visual cortex [Lowe, 2004] and IT
cortex [Lowe, 2000]. The concepts of hierarchical processing and intermediate features also have a
history of cross pollination between computer vision and neuroscience [Fukushima, 1980; Riesen-
huber and Poggio, 1999; Stringer and Rolls, 2002; Serre et al., 2007; Pinto et al., 2009]. This cross
pollination has also had great inﬂuence on the ﬁeld of neuroscience and has suggested ways to in-
vestigate how the brain works, suggesting speciﬁc hypotheses about its computational principles.
For the work presented here, the architectures and algorithms devised for hierarchical (deep) neural
networks may serve as concrete hypotheses for the computational mechanisms used by the visual
cortex to achieve fast and robust object recognition. We believe that the neuroscience ﬁeld needs
more concrete hypotheses and we hope that the latest representational learning algorithms will ﬁll
that void.
How do we measure representational efﬁcacy? Any quantitative evaluation of progress made in rep-
resentational learning must address this question. Here we advocate for the use of “kernel analysis,”
formulated in the works of [Braun, 2006; Braun et al., 2008; Montavon et al., 2011]. We believe
that kernel analysis has two main advantages. First, it measures the accuracy of a representation as a
function of the complexity of the task decision boundary. This allows us to identify representations
that achieve high accuracy for a given complexity. This also avoids a measurement confound that
arises when using cross-validated accuracy: the decision boundary’s complexity and/or constraints
are dependent on the size and choice of the training dataset, factors that can strongly affect accuracy
scores. By measuring how the accuracy is affected by the complexity of the decision boundary,
kernel analysis allows us to explicitly take this dependency into account. Second, kernel analysis
is particularly advantageous for comparisons between models and the brain because it is robust to
the number of samples used in the measurement. While our ability to measure neural activity in
the brain has increased exponentially (see [Stevenson and Kording, 2011] for an analysis of simul-
taneous recording growth rate, which is related to the number stimuli that can be measured), we
are still orders of magnitude away from the dataset sizes achieved in the machine learning commu-
nity. For this reason, measures that are useful in this low-sample regime are particularly important
when evaluating the performance of neural representations. Kernel analysis exhibits this property
as it converges quickly as a function of the number of samples (in our case images) used in the
analysis. Therefore, while other measures of representational efﬁcacy may be related to kernel anal-
ysis (such as cross-validated classiﬁcation accuracies, or counting the number of support vectors)
we here utilize kernel analysis for its convergence properties and explicit measurement of accuracy
versus complexity.
In general, there are a number of methodologies we might consider when comparing algorithms
to neural responses. One approach is to model neural variation directly [Wu et al., 2006]. This
approach is valid scientiﬁcally in the pursuit of understanding neural mechanisms, but it lacks a
representational aspect. For example, some details of neural activity may have no representational
value, insofar as their variation does not relate to any variable we are interested in representing
outside the neural mechanism. Therefore, we seek a measure that blends the neural measurement
with the representational tasks of interest. This approach does have its downsides; most troubling
of which is that we must choose a speciﬁc aspect of the world that is represented in the neural
system. We can hope that our chosen task is one that the neural system effectively represents –
ideally, one that the neural system has been optimized to represent. A major, unaccomplished, goal
of computational neuroscience is to determine the representation formed in the brain by ﬁnding
the mapping between external factors and neural response. In the methodology we propose, we do
not claim to have solved the problem of choosing the aspects of the world that the brain has been
optimized to represent, but we do believe we have chosen a reasonable task or aspect of the visual
environment: category-level object recognition.1
1In relation to the scientiﬁc goal of ﬁnding those aspects of the world that the brain is representing, kernel
analysis may be a way to measure which aspects of the world the brain has been optimized to represent: the
attributes of the environment that the neural representation is found to perform well on, may be those aspects
that the brain has been optimized to represent. However, such an examination is beyond the scope of this paper.
2
This work builds on a series of previous efforts to measure the representational efﬁcacy of mod-
els against that of the brain. The work of Nikolaus Kriegeskorte and colleagues, see for exam-
ple [Kriegeskorte et al., 2008b], examined the variation present in neural populations to visual stim-
uli presentations and compared this variation to the variation produced in model feature spaces to the
same stimuli. This work has inﬂuenced us in the pursuit of ﬁnding such mappings, but it has a major
downside for our purposes: it does not measure the variations in the neural or model spaces that are
relevant for a particular task, such as class-level object classiﬁcation2. There exist a number of pub-
lished accounts of neural datasets that might be useful for the type of comparison we seek [Wallis
and Rolls, 1997; Hung et al., 2005; Kiani et al., 2007; Rust and DiCarlo, 2010; Zhang et al., 2011],
but these measurements have not been released, are often made on only a handful of images, and the
measures given – typically cross-validated performance – are not as robust to low image counts as
the kernel analysis metric we use here.
In comparing algorithms to the brain, it is important to choose carefully the neural system to mea-
sure and the type of neural measurement to make. In this work we analyze the ventral stream of
macaque monkey, a non-human primate species. Using macaque visual cortex allows us to leverage
an extensive literature that includes behavioral measurements [Fabre-Thorpe et al., 1998], neural
anatomy [Felleman and Van Essen, 1991], extensive physiological measurements in numerous cor-
tical visual areas, and measurements using a variety of techniques, from single cell measurements,
to fMRI (for a review of high-level processing see [Orban, 2008]). These experiments indicate that
macaque has visual abilities that are close to those of humans, that the ventral cortical process-
ing stream (spanning V1, V2, V4, and IT) is relevant for object recognition, and that multi-unit
recordings in high-level visual areas exhibit responses that are increasingly robust to object identity
preserving variations (for a review see [DiCarlo et al., 2012]).
With these considerations in mind, we describe a neural representation benchmark that may be
used to judge the representational efﬁcacy of representational learning algorithms. Importantly, we
present a measurement of visual areas V4 and IT in macaque cortex on this benchmark. These
measurements allow researchers to test their algorithms against a known, high-performing repre-
sentation. They may also provide an evaluation and thus facilitate a long sought goal of artiﬁcial
intelligence: to achieve representations as effective as those found in the brain. Our preliminary
evaluation of machine representations indicates that we may be coming close to this goal.
The paper is organized as follows. In the Methods section we describe the images and task we use,
the neural measurements, the use of kernel analysis, and our suggested protocol for measuring al-
gorithms. In the Results section we provide the kernel analysis measurement on V4 and IT, on a
number of control models, and on some recently published high-performing neural network mod-
els. We conclude with a discussion of additional aspects of the neural system that will need to be
investigated to ultimately conclude that representational learning algorithms are as effective as the
brain.
2 Methods
The proposed benchmark utilizes an image dataset composed of seven object classes and is broken
down into three levels of variation, which present increasing levels of difﬁculty. We measure the
representational efﬁcacy of a feature space using kernel analysis, which measures the classiﬁcation
loss under an eigendecomposition of the representation’s kernel matrix (kernel PCA).
2.1 Image dataset generation
For the representational task, we have chosen class-level object recognition under the effect of image
variations due to object exemplar, geometric transformations (position, scale, and rotation/pose), and
background. The task is deﬁned through an image generation process. An image is constructed by
ﬁrst choosing one of seven categories, then one of seven object exemplars from that category, then
a randomly chosen background image, and ﬁnally the variation parameters drawn from one of three
distributions. The three different variation parameter distributions systematically increase the degree
2However, see [Kriegeskorte et al., 2008a] and [Mur et al., 2012], for discussion of methodologies to account
for dissimilarity matrices by class-distance matrices. Such a methodology will produce a single summary
number, and not the accuracy-complexity curves we achieve with kernel analysis.
3
of variation that is sampled, from Low Variation, which presents objects at a ﬁxed position, scale,
and pose, to Medium Variation, to High Variation, which presents objects at positions spanning the
image, under multi-octave scale dilation, and from a wide range of poses. Example images for each
variation level are shown in Figure 1.
High VariationMedium VariationLow Variation
"Car""Animal"
Figure 1: Example testing images for each variation level. For each variation level, Low, Medium
and High Variation, we show two example images from the Car class and two example images from
the Animal class. The car images shown all contain the same object instance, thus showing the
image variability due only to the variation parameters and backgrounds. The animal images contain
either a cow object instance or an elephant object instance, thus showing variability due to exemplar,
variation parameters, and background.
The resulting image set has several advantages and disadvantages. Advantageously, this procedure
eliminates dependencies between objects and backgrounds that may be found in real-world im-
ages [Oliva and Torralba, 2007], and introduces a controlled amount of variability or difﬁculty in
the task, which has been used to produce image datasets that are known to be difﬁcult for current
algorithms [Pinto et al., 2008, 2010, 2011]. While the resulting images may have an artiﬁcial quality
to them, having such control allows us to scientiﬁcally investigate neural coding in relation to these
parameters. The disadvantages of using this image set are that it does not expose contextual effects
that are present in the real world and may be used by both neural and machine systems, and we do
not (currently) include other relevant variations, e.g. lighting, texture, natural deformations, or oc-
clusion. We view these disadvantages as opportunities for future datasets and neural measurements.
2.2 Kernel analysis methodology
In measuring the efﬁcacy of a representation we seek a measure that will favor representations that
allow for a simple task solution to be learned. For this measure, we turn to the work presented
in [Montavon et al., 2011], which is based on theory presented in [Braun, 2006], and [Braun et al.,
2008]. We provide a brief description of this measure and refer the reader to those references for
additional details and justiﬁcation.
The measurement procedure, which we refer to here as kernel analysis, utilizes kernel principal
component analysis to determine how much of the task in question can be solved by the leading
kernel principal components. Kernel principal components analysis will decompose the variation
in the representational space due to the stimuli in question. A good representation will have high
variability in relation to the task in question. Therefore, if the leading kernel principal components
are effective at modeling the task, the representational space is effective for that task. In contrast, an
ineffective representational space will have very little variation relevant for the task in question and
variation relevant for the task is only contained in the eigenvectors corresponding to the smallest
eigenvalues of the kernel principal component analysis. Intuitively, a good representation is one
that learns a simple boundary from a small number of randomly-chosen examples, while a poor
representation makes a more complicated boundary, requiring many examples to do so.
Following [Montavon et al., 2011], kernel analysis consists of estimating the dﬁrst components of
the kernel feature space and ﬁtting a linear model on this low-rank representation to minimize the
loss function for the task. The subspaces formed by the dﬁrst components controls the complex-
4
ity of the model and the accuracy is measured by the loss in that subspace e(d). We refer to the
dimensionality of the subspace das the complexity and 1 −e(d) as the accuracy. Thus, the curve
1 −e(d) provides us with a measurement of the accuracy as a function of the model complexity for
the given representational space. The curves produced by different representational spaces will in-
form us about the simplicity of the task in that representational space, with higher curves indicating
that the problem is simpler for the representation.
One of the advantages of kernel analysis is that the kernel PCA method converges favorably from a
limited number of samples. Braun et al. [2008] show that the kernel PCA projections obtained with a
ﬁnite and typically small number of samples n(images) are close with multiplicative errors to those
that would be obtained in the asymptotic case where n ↦→∞. This result is especially important
in our setting as the number of images we can reasonably obtain from the neural measurements
is comparatively low. Therefore, kernel analysis provides us with a methodology for assessing
representational effectiveness that has favorable properties in the low image sample regime, here
thousands of images.
We next present the speciﬁc computational procedure for computing kernel analysis. Given the
learning problem p(x,y) and a set of n data points {(x1,y1),..., (xn,yn)}drawn independently
from p(x,y) we evaluate a representation deﬁned as a mapping x↦→φ(x). For our case, the inputs
xare images, the yare category labels, and the φdenotes a feature extraction process.
As suggested by [Montavon et al., 2011], we utilize the Gaussian kernel because this kernel implies
a smoothness of the task of interest in the input space [Smola et al., 1998]. We compute the kernel
matrix Kσ associated to the data set as
Kσ =


kσ(φ(x1),φ(x1)) ... k σ(φ(x1),φ(xn))
...
...
kσ(φ(xn),φ(x1)) ... k σ(φ(xn),φ(xn))

, (1)
where the standard Gaussian kernel is deﬁned as kσ(x,x′) = exp(−||x−x′||2/2σ2).
We perform an eigendecomposition ofKσ where the eigenvectorsu1,...,u nare sorted in decreasing
magnitude of their corresponding eigenvalues λ1,...,λ n:
Kσ = (u1|...|un)·diag(λ1,...,λ n)·(u1|...|un)T. (2)
Let ˆUd = (u1|...|ud) and ˆΛd = diag(λ1,...,λ d) be the d-dimensional approximation of the eigen-
decomposition. Note that we have dropped, for the moment, the dependency on σ. We then solve
the learning problem using a linear model in the corresponding subspace. For our problem we ﬁnd
the least squares solution to the multi-way regression problem denoted as Θ∗
d and deﬁned as
Θ∗
d = argminΘ ||ˆUdΘ −Y||2
F = ˆUT
d Y. (3)
The resulting model prediction is then ˆYd = ˆUdΘ∗
d. The resulting loss, with dependence on σis
e(d,σ) = 1
n||ˆYd −Y||2
F. (4)
To remove the dependence of the kernel on σ we ﬁnd the value that minimizes the loss at that
dimensionality d: e(d) = argmin σe(d,σ). Finally, for convenience we plot accuracy (1 −e(d))
against normalized complexity (d/D), where Dis total dimensionality.
Note that we have chosen to use a squared error loss function for our multi-way classiﬁcation prob-
lem. While it might be more appropriate to evaluate a multi-way logistic loss function, we have
chosen to use the least-squares loss for its computational simplicity, because it provides a stronger
requirement on the representational space to reduce variance within class and to increase variance
between classes, and it allows us to distinguish representations that may be identical in terms of
separability for a certain dimensionality dbut still have differences in their feature mappings. The
kernel analysis of deep Boltzmann machines in [Montavon and M ¨uller, 2012] also uses a mean
squared loss function in the classiﬁcation problem setting.
In the discussion above, Y = ( y1,...,y n) represents the vector of task labels for the images
(x1,...,x n). In our speciﬁc case, the yi are category identity values, and are assumed to be discrete
5
binary values in equations 3 and 4 above. To generalize to the case of multiway categorization, we
use a version of the common one-versus-all strategy. Assuming k distinct categories, we form the
label matrix
Y = (yij) =
{1 if image xi is in category j
0 otherwise (5)
where j ∈[1,...,k ]. Then for each categoryj, we compute the per-class predictionYj
d by replacing
Y in equations 3 and 4 with Yj, the j-th column of Y. The overall error is then the average over
classes of the per-class error, e.g.
e(d,σ) = ⟨ej(d,σ)⟩j =
⟨1
n||ˆYj
d −Yj||2
F
⟩
j
. (6)
Minimization over σthen proceeds as in the binary case.
2.3 Suggested protocol
To evaluate both neural representations and machine representations we measure the kernel analysis
curves and area under the curves (KA-AUC) for each variation. The testing image dataset consists of
seven object classes with seven instances per object class, broken down into three levels of variation,
with 490 images in Low Variation, 1960 in Medium Variation, and 1960 in High Variation. The
classes are Animals, Cars, Chairs, Faces, Fruits, Planes and Tables. To measure statistical variation
due to subsampling of image variation parameters we evaluate 10 pre-deﬁned subsets of images,
each taking 80% of the data from each variation level. Within each subset we equalize the number
of images from each class. For each representation, we maximize over the values of the Gaussian
kernel σ parameter chosen at 10%, 50%, and 90% quantiles in the distance distribution. For each
variation level and representation, this procedure produces a kernel analysis curve and AUC for each
of the subsets, and we compute the mean and standard deviation of the AUC values.
We also provide a training dataset that may be used for model selection. This dataset allows both
unsupervised and supervised training of representational learning algorithms.
2.4 Provided data and tools
To allow researchers to utilize this dataset we provide the following tools and downloadable data:
•Testing images: a set of images containing seven object classes with seven instances per object
class, broken down into three levels of variation, with 490 images in Low Variation, 1960 in
Medium Variation, and 1960 in High Variation. The classes are Animals, Cars, Chairs, Faces,
Fruits, Planes and Tables. Computing features on this set of images is sufﬁcient to evaluate an
algorithm. Each image is grayscale and 256 by 256 pixels. To prevent over-ﬁtting, candidate
algorithms should not be trained on this dataset, and any parameter estimation involved in model
selection should be estimated independently of these testing images.
•Training images: a set of 128,000 images consisting of 16 object classes with 16 object instances
per object class, these images are produced from a similar rendering procedure as the testing
image set. The training set contains no speciﬁc constituent objects or background images in
common with the testing set, but it does have new objects in each of the original seven categories,
in addition to 9 new categories. This image set can therefore be used for independent model
selection and learning, using either supervised for unsupervised methods, see Appendix A. Use
of this training set is, however, optional.
•Testing set kernel analysis curves and KA-AUC values for V4 and IT.
•Tools to evaluate kernel analysis from features produced by a model to be tested.
These tools and datasets can be found at: http://dicarlolab.mit.edu/neuralbenchmark.
2.5 Neural data collection
We collected 168 multi-unit sites from IT cortex and 128 multi-unit sites from V4. To form the
neural feature vectors for IT and V4 we normalized responses by background ﬁring rate and by
variance within a presentation of all images within a variation. See Appendix B for details. This
6
post-processing procedure has been shown to account for human performance [Majaj et al., 2012]
(also see [Hung et al., 2005; Rust and DiCarlo, 2010] for results utilizing a similar procedure).
2.6 Machine representations
We evaluate a number of machine representations from the literature, including several recent best
of breed representational learning algorithms and visual representation models, as well as a feed-
forward three layer hierarchical model optimized on the training set.
V1-like We evaluate the V1-like representation from Pinto et al.’s V1S+ [Pinto et al., 2008]. This
model attempts to capture a ﬁrst-order account of primary visual cortex (V1). It computes a collec-
tion of locally-normalized, thresholded Gabor wavelet functions spanning orientation and frequency.
This model is a simple, baseline biologically-plausible representation, against which more sophisti-
cated representations can be compared.
High-throughput L3 model class (HT-L3)We evaluate the same three layer hierarchical convolu-
tional neural net model class described in [Pinto et al., 2009] and [Pinto and Cox, 2011], the “L3
model class”. Each model in this class, is a three layer model in which each layer sequentially
performs local ﬁltering, thresholding, saturation, pooling, and normalization. To choose a high
performing model from this class, we performed a high-throughput search of the parameter space,
using kernel-analysis performance on the provided training image set as the optimization criterion.
The top performing model on the training set is then evaluated on the testing set (Top HT-L3). See
Appendix A for further details.
Coates et al. NIPS 2012We evaluate the unsupervised feature learning model in [Coates et al.,
2012], which learns 150,000 features from millions of unlabeled images collected from the Internet.
We evaluate the second layer “complex cells,” a 10,000 dimensional feature space, by rescaling
the input images to 96 by 96 pixels and computing the model’s output on a 3 by 3 grid of non-
overlapping 32 by 32 pixel windows. The resulting output is 90,000 dimensional.
Le et al. ICML 2012We evaluate the model in [Le et al., 2012], which is a hierarchical locally
connected sparse auto encoder with pooling and local contrast normalization and is trained unsu-
pervised from a dataset of 10 million images downloaded from the Internet and ﬁne-tuned with
ImageNet images and labels. We use the penultimate layer outputs (69696 features) of the network
for the feature representation (the layer before class-label prediction). Images are resized to the
model’s input dimensions, here 200 by 200 pixels.
Krizhevsky et al. NIPS 2012 (SuperVision)We evaluate the deep convolutional neural network
model ‘SuperVision’ described in [Krizhevsky et al., 2012], which is trained by supervised learning
on the ImageNet 2011 Fall release ( ∼15M images, 22K classes) with additional training on the
LSVRC-2012 dataset (1000 classes). The authors computed the features of the penultimate layer of
their model (4096 features) on the testing images by cropping out the center 224 by 224 pixels (this
is the input size to their model). This mimics the procedure described in [Krizhevsky et al., 2012],
in which this feature is fed into logistic regression to predict class labels.
3 Results
Evaluation of neural representations
In Figure 2 we present kernel analysis curves obtained from the measured V4 and IT neural popula-
tions for each variation level. KA-AUC values for V4 are 0.88, 0.66, and 0.56, and for IT are 0.90,
0.86, and 0.72, for Low, Medium, and High Variation, respectively. For each variation level, our
bootstrap analysis indicates that the KA-AUC measurements between IT and V4 are signiﬁcantly
different (see Table 1).
At Low Variation there is not a large difference between V4 and IT. This might be expected, as this
variation level does not test for variability due to scale, position, or pose, which are variations that
the neural responses in IT are more tolerant to than in V4. The higher variation sets, Medium and
High Variation, show increased separation between V4 and IT, and reduced performance for both
representations, indicating the increased difﬁculty of the task under these representations. However,
the IT representation maintains high accuracy at low complexity even in the High Variation condi-
7
High Variation
Medium Variation
Low Variation
IT (est.)
V4 (est.)
IT (est.)
V4 (est.)
IT (est.)
V4 (est.)
Figure 2: Kernel analysis curves of V4 and IT. Each panel shows the kernel analysis curves for
each variation level. Accuracy, one minus loss (1 −e(d)), is plotted against complexity, the normal-
ized dimensionality of the eigendecomposition ( d/D). Shaded regions indicate the maximum and
minimum accuracy obtained over testing subsets, which are often smaller than the line thickness.
tion. The IT representation under Medium and High Variation shows a sharp increase in accuracy
at low complexity, indicating that the IT representation is able to accurately capture the class-level
object recognition task with a simple decision boundary. Note that these kernel analysis measure-
8
Table 1: Kernel analysis results. For each representation we measure the KA-AUC at each variation
level for each testing subset. The means over testing subsets are given in the table, with standard
deviations in parentheses. Top performing models are highlighted. Note that our measurements of
IT and V4 Cortex are our current best estimates (est.) and are subject to experimental limitations.
Low Variation Medium Variation High Variation
IT Cortex (est.) 0.90 (2.4e-03) 0.86 (1.2e-03) 0.72 (2.2e-03)
V4 Cortex (est.) 0.88 (2.0e-03) 0.66 (3.2e-03) 0.56 (3.2e-03)
V1-like 0.84 (2.0e-03) 0.57 (2.9e-03) 0.52 (2.0e-03)
Top HT-L3 0.92 (1.4e-03) 0.62 (1.8e-03) 0.53 (1.7e-03)
Coates et al. NIPS 2012 0.83 (1.5e-03) 0.54 (3.0e-03) 0.52 (2.9e-03)
Le et al. ICML 2012 0.90 (2.4e-03) 0.69 (2.5e-03) 0.57 (3.0e-03)
Krizhevsky et al. NIPS 2012 0.88 (2.6e-03) 0.85 (2.0e-03) 0.75 (3.0e-03)
ments are only our current estimate of representation in V4 and IT. We discuss the limitations of
these estimates in the discussion section and provide an extrapolation in Appendix C.
Evaluation of machine representations
In Figure 3 we present the kernel analysis evaluation for the machine representations we have evalu-
ated along with the neural representations for comparison. The corresponding KA-AUC numbers are
presented in Table 1. The V1-like model shows high accuracy at low complexity on Low Variation
but performs quite poorly on Medium Variation and High Variation, indicating that these tasks are
interesting tests of the object recognition problem. The Top HT-L3 model is the highest performing
representation at Low Variation and achieves performance that approaches V4 on Medium Variation
and High Variation. The model presented in [Coates et al., 2012] performs similarity to the V1-like
model on all variation levels. This low performance may be due to the large variety of images this
model was trained on, its relatively shallow architecture, and/or the mismatch in our testing image
size and the 32 by 32 pixel patches of the base model. The model presented in [Le et al., 2012]
performs comparably to IT on Low Variation, and surpasses V4 at Medium and Variations.
The model in [Krizhevsky et al., 2012] performs comparably to V4 at Low Variation, nearly matches
the performance of IT at Medium Variation, and surpasses IT representation on High Variation. In-
terestingly, this model matches IT performance at Medium Variation across the entire complexity
range and exceeds it across the complexity range at High Variation. We view this result as highly
signiﬁcant as it is the ﬁrst model we have measured that matches our current estimate of IT repre-
sentation performance at Medium Variation and surpasses it at High Variation.
4 Discussion
There are a number of issues related to our measurement of macaque visual cortex, including view-
ing time, behavioral paradigm, neural subsampling, and mapping the neural recording to a neural
feature, that will be necessary to address in determining the ultimate representational measurement
of macaque visual cortex. The presentation time of the images shown to the animals was intention-
ally brief (100 ms), but is close to typical ﬁxation time ( ∼200 ms). Therefore, it will be interesting
to measure how the neural representational space changes with increased viewing time, especially
considering that natural viewing conditions typically allow for longer ﬁxation times and multiple
ﬁxations. Another aspect to consider is that animals are engaged in passive viewing during the ex-
perimental procedure. Does actively performing a task inﬂuence the neural representation? This
question may be related to what are commonly referred to as attentional phenomena [e.g. biased
competition]. Current experimental techniques only allow us to measure a small portion of the neu-
rons in a cortical area. While our analysis in Appendix C suggests that we are reaching saturation
in our estimate of KA-AUC with our current neural sample, our sample is biased spatially on the
cortical sheet because of our use of electrode grids. This bias likely leads to an underestimate of
KA-AUC. Finally, the neural code is a topic of heated debate in the neuroscience community and
the mapping from multi-unit recordings to the neural feature vector we have used for our analysis
is only one possible mapping. Importantly, this mapping has been shown to account for human
9
High Variation
Medium Variation
Low Variation
IT (est.)
V4 (est.)
IT (est.)
V4 (est.)
IT (est.)
V4 (est.)
Figure 3: Kernel analysis curves of brain and machine. “V4 (est.)” and “IT (est.)” are brain
representations and all others are machine representations. Each panel shows the kernel analysis
curves for each variation level. Accuracy, one minus loss (1−e(d)), is plotted against complexity, the
normalized dimensionality of the eigendecomposition (d/D). Shaded regions indicate the maximum
and minimum accuracy obtained over testing subsets, which are often smaller than the line thickness.
behavioral performance [Majaj et al., 2012]. However, as we gain more knowledge about cortical
processing (such as intrinsic dynamics [Canolty et al., 2010]) our best guess at the neural code may
evolve and update our neural representation benchmark accordingly.
10
Another aspect that our measurement does not address is the direct impact of visual experience on
the representations observed in IT cortex. Interestingly, the macaques involved in these studies have
had little or no real-world experience with a number of the object categories used in our evaluation,
though they do beneﬁt from millions of years of evolution and years of postnatal experience. How-
ever, learning effects in adult IT cortex are well observed [Kobatake et al., 1998; Baker et al., 2002;
Sigala and Logothetis, 2002], even with passive viewing [Li and DiCarlo, 2010]. Remaining unan-
swered questions are: how has the exposure during the experimental protocol affected the neural
representation, and could the neural representation be further enhanced with increased exposure?
A related question: is the training set we have provided sufﬁcient to achieve IT level performance on
the testing set? We do not have a positive example of such transfer, and we expect that algorithms
leveraging massive amounts of visual data may produce the best results on the testing set. Such
algorithms, and their data dependence, will be informative. Furthermore, to what extent do we
need to build additional structure into our representations and representational learning algorithms
to achieve representations equivalent to those found in the brain?
Could human neural representation, if measured, be better than what we observe in macaque IT cor-
tex? If the volume of cortical tissue is related to representational efﬁcacy, it is likely that the human
ventral stream would achieve even better performance. While determining human homologues of
macaque visual cortex is under active investigation, it is known that primary visual cortex in humans
is twice as large as in macaque [Van Essen, 2003]. While this is suggestive that human visual repre-
sentation may be even better under our metric, the scaling of human visual cortex over macaque may
be optimizing representational aspects that we are not measuring here. In summary, we suspect that
the estimates for representational performance in macaque we have presented here provide a lower
bound in performance of the human visual system. One way to address human visual representation
may be through the use of fMRI or inference of the human representational space from behavioral
measurements. We, and others in the neuroscience ﬁeld, are actively pursuing these directions.
Where are we today?
Under our analysis, we believe that the ﬁeld has made signiﬁcant advances with recent algorithms.
On the intermediate level variation task (Medium Variation) these advances are quite evident: the
recent representational learning algorithm in [Le et al., 2012] surpasses the representation in V4 and,
surprisingly, the supervised algorithm of [Krizhevsky et al., 2012] matches the representation in IT.
These advances are also evident on the high level variation task (High Variation): the [Le et al.,
2012] algorithm is narrowly better than V4 and the [Krizhevsky et al., 2012] algorithm beats IT by
an ample margin. It will be informative to measure the elements of these models that lead to this
performance and it will be interesting to see if purely unsupervised algorithms can achieve similar
performance.
A vision for the future
The methodology we have proposed here can be extended to other sensory domains where repre-
sentation is critical and neural representations are thought to be effective. For example, it should
be possible to deﬁne similar task protocols for auditory stimuli and measure the neural responses in
auditory cortex. Such measurements would not only have implications for discovering effective au-
ditory representations, but may also provide the data necessary to validate representational learning
algorithms that are effective in multiple contexts. Representational learning algorithms that prove
effective across these domains may serve as hypotheses for a canonical cortical algorithm, a ‘holy
grail’ for artiﬁcial intelligence research.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the U.S. National Eye Institute (NIH NEI: 5R01EY014970-09), the National
Science Foundation (NSF: 0964269), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA: HR0011-
10-C-0032). C.F.C was supported by the U.S. National Eye Institute (NIH: F32 EY022845-01). We thank
Adam Coates, Quoc Le, and Alex Krizhevsky for their help in evaluating their models and comments on the
paper.
11
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Appendix
Appendix A: High-throughput evaluation of the L3 model class
Using the L3 model class, we performed a high-throughput search of the parameter space by evaluating ap-
proximately 500 parameter selections at random on training image sets. We ran each L3 model parameter
instantiation on category-balanced subset of 12,800 randomly chosen images from the 128,000-image training
set. For each instantiation, we evaluated a kernel analysis protocol similar to that used for the testing set, but
with the 16 object class labels of the training set as opposed to the 7 present in the testing set. For each model
instantiation, we also extracted features on the testing set images, and ran the standard kernel analysis protocol.
To evaluate the transfer between the training set and testing set, we examined how well training set scores
predict testing set scores by comparing how relative performance rankings on the training set transfer to the
testing set. Figure 4 shows these results. Performance on the training set is strongly correlated with performance
on Medium ( r = 0.64) and High Variation ( r = 0.58) components of testing set, and weakly correlated on
the Low Variation condition. This might be expected, as the training set contains variation similar to the High
Variation testing set. The single best model from training achieves a high score on the testing set relative to
other models in the training set and is in the range of the top machine-learning representations. This data
indicates that models that are trained using the provided training set can perform favorably on the testing set.
Appendix B: Neural data collection
We have collected neural data from V4 and IT across two adult male rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta, 7 and 9
kg) by using a multi-electrode array recording system (BlackRock Microsystems, Cerebus System). We chron-
ically implanted three arrays per animal and have recorded the best 128 visually driven neural measurement
sites (determined by separate pilot images) in one animal (58 IT, 70 V4) and 168 in another (110 IT, 58 V4).
During stimulus presentation we recorded multi-unit neural responses to our images (see Section 2.1) from the
V4 and IT sites. Stimuli were presented on an LCD screen (Samsung, SyncMaster 2233RZ at 120Hz) one
13
at a time. Each image was presented for 100ms with a radius of 8 ◦ at the center of the screen on top of the
half-gray background and was followed by a 100ms half-gray “blank” period. The animal’s eye movement was
monitored by a video eye tracking system (SR Research, EyeLink II), and the animal was rewarded upon the
successful completion of 6–8 image presentations while maintaining good eye ﬁxation (jitter within ±2◦ was
determined acceptable ﬁxation) at the center of the screen, indicated by a small (0.25 ◦) red dot. Presentations
with large eye movements were discarded. In each experimental block, we recorded responses to all images of
a certain variation level. Within one block each image was repeated three times for Low Variation and once
for Medium and High Variation. This resulted in the collection of 28, 51, and 47 image repetitions for Low,
Medium, and High Variation respectively. All surgical and experimental procedures are in accordance with the
National Institute of Health guidelines and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Committee on Animal
Care.
We convert the raw neural responses to a neural representation through the following normalization process.
For each image in a block, we compute the vector of raw ﬁring rates across measurement sites by counting
the number of spikes between 70ms and 170ms after the onset of the image for each site. We then subtracted
the background ﬁring rate, which is the ﬁring rate during presentation of a half-gray background or “blank”
image, from the evoked response. In order to minimize the effect of variable external noise, we normalize by
the standard deviation of each site’s response to a block of images for Medium and High Variation. For the Low
Variation stimuli, we divide the three repetitions within each block into three separate sets, each containing a
complete set of images, and normalize by the standard deviation of each site’s response within its set. Finally,
the neural representation is calculated by taking the mean across the repetitions for each image and for each site,
producing a scalar valued matrix of neural sites by images. This post-processing procedure is only our current
best-guess at a neural code, which has been shown to account for human performance [Majaj et al., 2012].
Therefore, it may be possible to develop a more effective neural decoding, for example inﬂuenced by intrinsic
cortical variability [Stevenson et al., 2012], or dynamics [Churchland et al., 2012; Canolty et al., 2010].
Appendix C: KA-AUC and subsampling of neural sites
Current experimental techniques only allow us to measure a small portion of the neurons in a cortical area.
We seek to estimate how our kernel analysis metric would be affected by having a larger neural sample. In
Figure 5 we estimate the effect of subsampling the neural population in our measurement, showing the KA-
AUC as a function of the number of neural measurement sites. To estimate the asymptotic convergence of each
neural representation (V4 and IT) at each variation level, we ﬁt a curve of the form AUC (t) = a+be−ctd
,
where t is the number of neural sites and a, b, c, and d are parameters3. This provides us with an estimate
of the KA-AUC for the entire neural population. The estimated asymptotic values for the KA-AUC’s for V4
are 0.89, 0.69, and 0.66, and for IT are 0.93, 0.91, and 0.75, for Low Variation, Medium Variation, and High
Variation, respectively. Interestingly we ﬁnd that for the number of neural sites we have measured we are
already approaching the asymptotic value. Therefore, for the given task speciﬁcation, preprocessing procedure,
and convergence estimate, we believe we are reaching saturation in our estimate of KA-AUC for the neural
population in V4 and IT.
Errata
An earlier version of this manuscript contained incorrectly computed kernel analysis curves and KA-AUC
values for V4, IT, and the HT-L3 models. They have been corrected in this version.
3We found that this functional form ﬁt well a similar analysis performed on a computational representation
in which we subsampled the number of features included in the analysis. This allowed us to estimate the
behavior of KA-AUC in much larger feature spaces (>4000 features) than in the neural measurements.
14
Figure 4: High-throughput L3 model relationship between training and testing performance. Each
panel shows a scatter plot between the measured training KA-AUC and the testing KA-AUC for
each variation level. Red lines indicate best linear ﬁt. Red dots are the best and worst performing
models on the training set and best performing model on each testing set (standard deviations are
shown as error bars and are small in the testing axis). Note that there is only one value for the
training KA-AUC for each model. The linear relationships we observe indicate that the provided
training set is informative for the testing set.
15
High Variation
Medium Variation
Low Variation
Figure 5: Effect of sampling in neural areas. We estimate the effect of sampling the neural sites on
the testing set KA-AUC. Each panel shows the effect for each variation level. Best ﬁt curves are
shown as solid lines with measured samples indicated by ﬁlled circles. Estimated asymptotes are
indicated by dashed horizontal lines. See text for more details.
16


Peer review:
[Review]:
The paper presents a benchmark for comparing representations of image data in brains and machines. The benchmark consists of looking at how the image categorization task is encoded in the leading kernel principal components of the representation, thus leading to an analysis of complexity and noise. The paper contains extensive experiments based on a representive set of state-of-the-art learning algorithms on the machine learning side, and real recordings of macaques brain activity on the neural side.

The research presented in this paper is well-conducted, timely and highly innovative. It is to my knowledge the first time, that representations obtained with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for vision are systematically compared with real neural representations. The authors motivate the use of kernel analysis, by the inbuilt robustness to sample size being desirable in this heterogeneous setting.

The dataset used in the paper is composed of objects that are superposed to an independent background. While authors motivate their choice by controlling the factors of variations in the representation, it would be interesting to know whether machine learning or brain representations benefit most from this particular setting.

This paper also raises the important question of what is the best way of comparing representations. One can wonder, for example, whether the reduced set of kernels considered here (Gaussian kernels with multiple scales) introduces some bias in favor of 'Gaussian-friendly' representations. Also, as suggested by the authors, it could be that the way neural recordings are represented leads to underestimating their discriminative ability.