@article {3881, title = {Single units in a deep neural network functionally correspond with neurons in the brain: preliminary results}, year = {2018}, month = {11/2018}, abstract = {

Deep neural networks have been shown to predict neural responses in higher visual cortex. The mapping from the model to a neuron in the brain occurs through a linear combination of many units in the model, leaving open the question of whether there also exists a correspondence at the level of individual neurons. Here we show that there exist many one-to-one mappings between single units in a deep neural network model and neurons in the brain. We show that this correspondence at the single- unit level is ubiquitous among state-of-the-art deep neural networks, and grows more pronounced for models with higher performance on a large-scale visual recognition task. Comparing matched populations{\textemdash}in the brain and in a model{\textemdash}we demonstrate a further correspondence at the level of the population code: stimulus category can be partially decoded from real neural responses using a classifier trained purely on a matched population of artificial units in a model. This provides a new point of investigation for phenomena which require fine-grained mappings between deep neural networks and the brain.

}, author = {Luke Arend and Yena Han and Martin Schrimpf and Pouya Bashivan and Kohitij Kar and Tomaso Poggio and James J. DiCarlo and Xavier Boix} }