TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
PROBLEM: Momentary fluctuations in attention (perceptual accuracy) correlate with neural activity fluctuations in primate visual areas. Yet, the link between such momentary neural fluctuations and attention state remains to be shown in the human brain. We investigate this link using a real-time cognitive brain machine interface (cBMI) based on steady state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs): occipital EEG potentials evoked by rhythmically flashing stimuli. Tracking momentary fluctuations in SSVEP power, in real-time, we presented stimuli time-locked to when this power reached (predetermined) high or low thresholds. We observed a significant increase in discrimination accuracy (d') when stimuli were triggered during high (versus low) SSVEP power epochs, at the location cued for attention. Our results indicate a direct link between attention’s effects on perceptual accuracy and and neural gain in EEG-SSVEP power, in the human brain.


SOLUTION: With a cognitive brain-machine interface, we show a direct link between attentional effects on perceptual accuracy and neural gain in EEG-SSVEP power, in the human brain.

PROBLEM: A number of recent methods to understand neural networks have focused on quantifying the role of individual features.   One such method, NetDissect identifies interpretable features of a model using the Broden dataset of visual semantic labels (colors, materials, textures, objects and scenes).   Given the recent rise of a number of action recognition datasets, we propose extending the Broden dataset to include actions to better analyze learned action models.   We describe the annotation process, results from interpreting action recognition models on the extended Broden dataset and examine interpretable feature paths to help us understand the conceptual hierarchy used to classify an action.

SOLUTION: We expand Network Dissection to include action interpretation and examine interpretable feature paths to understand the conceptual hierarchy used to classify an action.

PROBLEM: Deep Convolutional Networks (DCNs) have been shown to be sensitive to Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs): input-agnostic perturbations that fool a model on large portions of a dataset. These UAPs exhibit interesting visual patterns, but this phenomena is, as yet, poorly understood. Our work shows that visually similar procedural noise patterns also act as UAPs. In particular, we demonstrate that different DCN architectures are sensitive to Gabor noise patterns. This behaviour, its causes, and implications deserve further in-depth study.

SOLUTION:
Existing Deep Convolutional Networks in image classification tasks are sensitive to Gabor noise patterns, i.e. small structured changes to the input cause large changes to the output.